Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...question became not just who was crazy and who was sane, but who was there and who was not. Westmoreland and LBJ were not there--they dreamed of conquering Gaul. Tim O'Brien, the ex-infantryman and former Washington Post reporter who is the author of this fine novel was, and wondering why he had not gotten on the bus to Canada. And Cacciato was marching the 8,600 statute miles that lie between the Laotian border and Paris. Paris, France...
...such movies go, Crossed Swords is somewhat above the norm. Adapted from Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, it recounts a highly satisfying story in an amiable fashion. Though Screenwriter George MacDonald Fraser has replaced many of the novel's jokes with vaguely risqué punch lines of his own, he has preserved the book's theme. By the time Prince Edward and London Slum Boy Tom Canty reclaim their rightful identities at the movie's end, the audience has been stirred by Twain's passionate devotion to democratic ideals...
Like his enormously successful Watership Down and Shardik, Richard Adams' third novel relies heavily on animal magnetism. This time out, two plucky dogs named Rowf and Snitter escape from an experimental station in the English Lake District, where they have been treated bestially by doctors. Freedom means surviving in the inhospitable countryside and dodging much of the British population, which incorrectly believes the animals have been inoculated with plague. On their journey the beleaguered canines are aided by a roguish fox. It is hard to say anything critical about such a heartwarming story...
...first time Adams introduces contemporary humans into his fiction. In a preface he distinguishes the ones who are "pleasant" from those who are "unpleasant." This criterion is useful when planning a dinner party but not quite up to the demands of a lengthy novel...
...novel chronicles the postcombat experiences of four World War II infantrymen: Mart Winch, John Strange, Bobby Prell and Marion Landers. All noncoms from the same outfit, three of them wounded, the fourth ill with the same kind of congestive heart condition that killed Jones, they ship home from the Pacific to a military hospital close by Luxor, a fictional Southern city on the Mississippi. There "the days passed with a swift inexorability that was the essence of a tragedy in a drama." And there the four muddle through a sequence of implausibly pathetic fates. The rushed, bumpy narrative seems less...