Word: scenes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ploys and counterploys of the campaign involve some fairly melodramatic goings-on, including an illegitimate childbirth in the street, a scene full of authentic Faulknerian gore. Author Stone is expert at suggesting the blend of revival-meeting urgency, circus gaiety, and kith-and-kin intimacy that flavors rural Southern politics. But the serpentine twists and turns of logic in his novel would tax Laocoön on a good wrestling day. There is a baffling subplot about a priggish schoolteacher and his nymphomaniac wife, who farms out her favors on a faded billiard table. Though the teacher is unnerved...
...title is taken from a Chinese poem in which a lonely man in a watchtower looks out across a barbarous and a desolate land. But it is also the gate at which the sentinels of civilization have always stood guard and always died in the end. The scene of this modern tale of horror is Africa, where the Roman watch fell to the Vandals 1,500 years ago, and where today the British guard is falling to nationalism. Whatever its accuracy as an omen, By the North Gate is one of the year's most chilling novels...
...Griffin, who was an officer in the British colonial army in Africa in World War II, seems to know about administrative misfits and the cheap little ploys of petty, ambitious men in seats of power. Most of all, he can catch the hatred of mistreated natives in a brief scene, show on a single page the vast gulf of misunderstanding that separates insensitive whites and long-suffering blacks. His desert comes powerfully alive in brief, sharp descriptions, and without leaving his brutal, well-plotted story for a moment he makes his grim but debatable point with clarity: if Africa...
...innocence with ingratiating charm. She casts a golden glow over the company, and knows how to be still and still radiant. But her lover, Richard (Richard Watson), fails to hold up his end as the youthful son of the parish poor box. For this reason their third act love scene is somewhat less than effective...
...Harvard: plastic trays replaced china in the dining halls, and hundreds of WAVES swamped Radcliffe; the Lampoon and the Advocate suspended publication, and the CRIMSON became the Service News; the College was in session all year, and the fervor of a nation at war pervaded the usually staid Cambridge scene. Just as World War II did things for Harvard, however, the University did things for World War II. 25,540 of the almost 100,000 living alumni and students served in the Allied forces and 455 of them never returned. In addition, 654 Faculty and staff members, one-third...