Word: novels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick wrote last year's bestselling novel, The Ugly American (Norton; $3.95), they meant the title for the hero: a hard-palmed U.S. engineer working in Southeast Asia, who stood in sharp contrast to bumbling American officials abroad. A thesis writer might well peer into how the nation has curiously misused the title ever since. It has come to mean the very bumblers whom the authors denounced. The "Ugly American" is now a villain...
...without ability." And when Douglas pleads for death by firing squad rather than by hanging, Burgoyne asks: "Have you any idea of the average marks manship of the Army of His Majesty King George III?" But Devil remains threadbare and lacks, as Shaw also noted, "a single even passably novel incident...
Myra & Resignation. By comparison, Victors and Vanquished sounds more like romantic imagination than on-the-spot recollection from Author Stuart's shadowed war years. His Myra emerges first in peacetime Berlin, where Luke Cassidy, the novel's hero, is lecturing on English literature. He falls ill, and Nurse Myra ministers to him so angelically that later, after war has broken out, Cassidy feels he must see her again. He skips neutral Ireland to resume his post at Berlin University. Myra shows neither surprise nor joy when Cassidy returns from Ireland to announce his love and troubled decision...
Much of this discursive novel is evidently autobiographical. Examples: 1) Like his hero. Author Stuart left Ireland in 1940 and spent most of the war years as a lecturer in Berlin; 2) Stuart was once highly praised by W. B. Yeats, once married to the adopted daughter of Maude Gonne, the Egeria of Yeats's nationalist literary salon; his Cassidy has an Irish wife and admits once knowing Yeats "quite well." At one point in the story Cassidy finds a cache of Irish whisky; Author Stuart's style resembles it-warming in small doses only, smoky and unpredictable...
...them is dragged into the open air and forced to stare first at the objects themselves, then at the agonizing reality of the sun, he fights to disbelieve his senses. So, when their hidden natures are thrust into the light, do the troubled characters of this violent novel...