Word: sagas
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...LEATHERSTOCKING SAGA, by James Fenimore Cooper, edited by Allan Nevins (833 pp.; Pantheon; $8.50). In a heroic effort to save one of his favorite authors from the oblivion of an unread classic. Columbia University's versatile Historian Allan Nevins has undertaken to streamline Fenimore Cooper for moderns. A lifelong Cooper fan who played make-believe Deerslayer as an Illinois farmboy, Nevins has taken the five Leatherstocking tales-The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers and The Prairie-shorn away the interminable love passages and faded humor, deftly stitched the rest together to fit into...
Librettist Joe Darion fairly faithfully followed the saga of archy, described by his creator, the late Columnist Don Marquis, as a sensitive cockroach who had to express himself or die. For archy, writing was even more painful than for most poets: he had to type each letter by diving headfirst from the frame of the machine to the keys (his works were all in lower case because he was unable to land simultaneously on the shift key). His bruised outpourings are mostly about mehitabel, the life-battered but life-loving cat ("toujours gai, toujours gai") who is pretty sure...
...BarefootContessa (Figaro-United Artists) starts off as a series of expert thrusts through the tinsel of the perennial Hollywood rags-to-stardom saga. But Writer-Director-Producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who has successfully charred his bread and butter before (All About Eve). this time reaches so hard for significance that he loosens his grip on the ironic Hollywood spoof he almost has in hand...
...TIME FOR SERGEANTS, by Mac Hymen (214 pp.; Random House; $2.95), is the comic saga of how the U.S. Air Force grabs a Georgia cracker and learns it has bit off more than it can chew. Will Stockdale is not mean, but too dark an eight ball for even a general to stand behind. He is drafted after a pitched battle on Tobacco Road and in the barracks blows doleful music on his mouth harp to the tune Mother Ain't Dead, She's Only Sleeping. Will's perceptive sergeant appoints him permanent latrine orderly. On inspection...
Terror on Broadway by David Alexander (Random House; $2.75) is written in a language that bears a deceptive resemblance to English but is actually Broadwayese. In Novelist Alexander's hands, it is a blunt instrument that he uses to hammer out the unhappy saga of Waldo. Waldo is a psychopathic killer who gets a boyish kick out of playing ticktacktoe with a knife on the bodies of the ladies he dispatches. It is perfectly clear at the very beginning that Waldo is going to be caught by Hero Bart Hardin, editor of the Broadway Times, a journal devoted...