Word: patch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Lurking among the flowers and vegetables in many a South African garden patch is an innocent-looking weed called dagga. Dried and smoked like marijuana, a close relative, it induces a dreamy recklessness that can spur men to acts of terrible savagery. Nearly one-fourth of the rapes, murders and maulings that occur in the slums of South Africa's great cities are blamed on dagga...
Similar questions have been asked in a handful of books about Southeast Asia, notably Norman Lewis' A Single Pilgrim (TIME, April 26, 1954). Author Shaplen manages to suggest that the answers are easy without really giving any answer. Faced with immensely complex problems, Hero Adam Patch wades in with the zeal and vocabulary of a New Republic editorial. The U.S. consul in Saigon, he chafes under what he thinks is stifling official caution. If only his stuffy superiors would let him get to the little people of the villages, let him bypass the complacent French, and let the Vietnamese...
...hurl grenades into cafés in broad daylight. Harmless-looking old shopkeepers convert their shabby little stores into arms depots for Communist agents. A Chinese gambling-house operator runs weapons to the enemy. Counterespionage is apt at any time to burgeon into counter-counterespionage. At this game Adam Patch is about as subtle as a sand-lot quarterback. A Vietnamese doctor shows up, claiming to be a deserter from the Communists, with a plan for winning the countryside that the Reds have not yet seized. Although nothing reliable is known about him, Adam latches onto...
...taking yoghurt. The Eurasian girl he takes to bed turns out to be as mixed up in her political senses as she is in her veins: working as an agent for both the French and the Communists, she is eventually caught and doomed. At novel's end Adam Patch is recalled to Washington, the victim of what Author Shaplen plainly indicts as U.S. failure to pursue its democratic ideals...
...help was probably too little and too late. Above all, there is the real problem of how to convince the world that America stands for freedom. But it is frightening to think of this mission in the hands of men like Author Shaplen's hero. For Adam Patch is just a fugitive from the WPA era transplanted to Indo-China; any halfway smart Communist agent could sell him the Hanoi bridge...