Word: novelized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Forget hedging your bets. Just read it. It is the finest novel of the year. It is the finest novel of most years...
...Caine Mutiny, the novel that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1952, Herman Wouk created a character named Tom Keefer. Lieut. Keefer was an officer on the Caine, but his preoccupation was the great war novel he was writing: Multitudes, Multitudes. Now Wouk has written a novel that would have daunted even Keefer: World War II with the original cast. The author began his story with what he calls a "prologue," The Winds of War, an 885-page novel published in 1971. In that book the action was carried on the square shoulders of a Navy career officer named Victor...
...strategies, he again employs an unusual device, an invented history called World Holocaust, written from the enemy's viewpoint by a German general and translated, after the war, by Pug Henry himself. As for the fictional characters, their private adventures take place against explicit historical back drops. The novel's involvement with the complicated struggle to build an atomic bomb includes a conversation on pioneer nuclear physics that is a masterpiece of layman's clarity. The Navy's little-remembered but terrible defeat at the Battle of Tassafaronga is described more vividly by Wouk than...
Wouk is still at his best when his feet are firmly astride a swaying deck: the battles at sea provide the novel's swiftest and most knowing passages. Yet for all the exhilaration his warriors display in combat, Wouk knows the bitter price of valor. Here and there he lectures too self-consciously. But even as a preacher the author can be effective. Through the voice of Pug, Wouk writes that the world's destiny rests on a pathetically simple hope: "Most people, even the most fanatical and boneheaded Marxists, even the craziest nationalists and revolution aries, love...
...began to doubt," he recalls, "not the power of God, but all the traditions and dogmas." Deterred from a religious vocation, Isaac followed his equally radical brother Israel Joshua to the journals of Warsaw. In his spare time, the young reporter wrote a handful of stories and a dark novel about a false messiah, Satan in Goray, that prefigured his later works...