Word: novel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Lions (20th Century-Fox). "And the sword shall devour thy young lions," wrote the prophet Nahum. His words, affixed in epigraph to Irwin Shaw's bestseller of 1948, seemed no more than intellectual makeweight in what proved to be a light package. But the film version of the novel, as conceived and produced by the late Al Lichtman (TIME, March 3), strikes deeper into human substance and rises more often to the epic height of its adage and its argument. Epic is plainly what Moviemaker Lichtman hoped to achieve-a sort of Europead elaborated out of the decisive events...
...present literary rate of exchange, one African safari equals roughly one novel about Mau Mau trouble. Most such books shine only a feeble light into an area where burning racial hatred has obscured the underlying questions of right and wrong-or else they glare with a Ruark-like, eyewitness sensationalism. It may be a virtue of The Leopard that its author, Victor Reid, has never been in Africa...
Novelist Reid is a Jamaican journalist; his only other novel. New Day, reflected the color and sensuousness of his native Caribbean island. What he has tried for in The Leopard is more than a look into a Mau Mau mind. It is no less than an effort to glimpse the African soul suffering between felt injustice and the dim knowledge that the white man's impact has ended once and for all the chance of returning to the Eden of primitive ignorance and tribal pride that existed before he came...
What Author Reid has done is to give his story the quality of near myth to make the horror understandable. No recent novel about the Mau Mau has succeeded as does The Leopard in making clear how the black man rationalizes his murderous bent. What is even more remarkable is Author Reid's ability to create a feeling for the land itself, to blend a lyrical, near-poetic portrait of a primitive mind with his brutal subject matter. Unashamedly contrived, his book is quite simply a brief imaginative triumph...
This is a first novel about a small New York businessman that blends folk humor with wisecrack as if Sam Levenson had had his jokes edited by George S. Kaufman. Hero Bill Roth, 23, is an ex-G.I. working for his engineering degree who lives with his parents in The Bronx. He sleeps on a sofa couch in the living room "on the main trade route from the bedroom to the bathroom." When he stays out late with girls or comes home with liquor on his breath, he is treated to his mother's virtuoso sighs...