Word: heathen
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Graves's tale (based on historical fact) tells how vapid General Mendaña y Castro set sail from Callao, Peru with four ships to take possession of the dimly known Solomons and to convert the heathen -mostly into cash. But the heart of the book, like that of any pirate story, is Graves's evocation of the murderous plotting and quarreling that enlivened the long and miserable voyage: its sailors, soldiers, settlers and missionaries fall on one another (and on the hapless islanders) with a ferocity inspired equally by high zeal and abysmal greed...
Mencken has been a prodigious workman with a fine regard for the craft of writing. Even the "professors" he loved to pummel had to cheer his massive, scholarly and readable American Language as the best thing of its kind. At another extreme, his autobiographical books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days) are among the most engaging of any in U.S. writing. During the past decade his writings and utterances have tended toward peevish and irresponsible flailings of men and politics. But he has seldom hit below the belt and has never used the stab in the back. Whatever his justifications...
Robert Salau was born about 42 years ago on densely wooded Vella Lavella, some 200 miles northwest of Guadalcanal in the Solomons group. His mother had been captured by his father's head-hunting tribe in a raid on another island. ("My people heathen, you know-killing one another.") When the Adventists set up a school in the beach village, young Salau ran away from home to join, and eventually became a pastor. Now, he estimates he has had a hand, in converting some 2,000 natives in the Pacific islands. Says Salau...
...passed by the monks, leaving them in their unreal tranquillity with no concern greater than the aim of converting the Protestant and the Jew. The monks are oblivious to the Catholic chaplain's attempts to reason with them; he begs them to accept the fact that the two "heathen" are just as religious in their own way--but the monks can only sit fasting in horrified silence...
...somebody in Oslo, his face brightens quickly and he asks: "What do you think of him?" Nobody in Norway, as far as I can tell, knows exactly what to think. But when outlanders like British Novelist Evelyn Waugh attack their favorite son, Norwegians are shocked and depressed. "The most heathen thing I have seen in Europe," Waugh recently told an interviewer. "A subhuman zoo in bronze and granite . . . more terrible than the ruins of Hiroshima...