Word: nevil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...CHEQUER BOARD (380 pp.)-Nevil Shute-Morrow...
...reserve lieutenant commander in the British Navy in World War II, Novelist Nevil Shute observed that the behavior of U.S. Negro troops was sometimes more orderly than that of white troops. Later he was assigned to a motor gunboat in Burma, where he was impressed with the intelligence and charm of the Burmese people. By the time he sat down to write The Chequer Board, his sympathy for colored peoples had become an explicit insistence on social equality. Says his white hero, slowly dying of his war wounds: "I had been thinking about these darker-skinned people that...
MOST SECRET - Nevil Shute - Morrow ($2.50). This slickly competent wartime adventure story is put together on such sound box-office principles that it might do as a cinema vehicle for Errol Flynn. It has all the required ingredients : commando raid, secret agent, love interest, a London blitz, shiny-eyed self-sacrifice, and a gallant English officer who wants to kill Germans because a bomb's blast killed his pet rabbit, Geoffrey. The publishers boast that three of British naval-officer-novelist Shute's last five books (Ordeal, Pied Piper, Pastoral) have been selected by "major book clubs...
...brush with the Gestapo nearly ends the Piper's tour, but, at least in Hollywood, Englishmen like Woolley always win through. His children's crusade, scripted by Producer Nunnally Johnson from Nevil Shute's novel of the same name, is too episodic for all-out drama, but it is a mellow, amusing, often moving excursion...
This image, of a frail, gravely serene, utterly courageous creature of the past, transporting across the immediate ruin of the human present the innocent and polyglot future, has exciting possibilities both for tear-jerking and for simple grandeur. Nevil Shute's modest abilities are at least honest and competent enough to make it a good story...