Word: halliburtons
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Sighted in mid-Pacific by a ship of the American President Lines, President Pierce, was a waterlogged, barnacle-covered piece of driftwood resembling the rudder of the Chinese junk in which globe-trotting Author Richard Halliburton was lost with all hands last year...
When, at the age of 22, Richard Halliburton lawlessly hid in the shrubbery, watched the Taj Mahal and his chance by moonlight, and swam in the lily-padded pool, he was neither putting on a show nor concocting copy: he was simply a college boy on the loose, a little bit crazy with romantic enthusiasm...
These episodes and the change of spirit that took place between them may be understood from Halliburton's letters home, of which this volume is a selection. The stunts, it is obvious, became more & more staged, more & more weary, as time went on. Yet the naivete which made it possible for him to invent them was also nearly great enough to exonerate him of their ridiculousness, their frantic commercialism. His last stunt - a voyage across the Pacific in a Chinese junk, which ended somewhere at sea - was of a piece with all the rest...
...Halliburton was something more than a bad writer, a rather hard-to-take public figure. He was an appealing, confused individual, a U. S. phenomenon, a U. S. symbol. The nice son of a nice U. S. environment, he never entirely either out grew or betrayed it. He was essentially, if mildly, an artist and a rebel, he achieved neither art nor rebellion. He was an innocent sort of Byron-of-his-time...
...easy to laugh off Richard Halliburton as it ever was; and this book could easily be regarded merely as one last bid to the fans. But as a record of an eager human life, and of the relations of that life to its parents and its planet, it is a touching tale...