Word: shaplen
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...FOREST OF TIGERS (373 pp.)-Robert Shaplen-Knopf...
...easier to be a political novelist than Secretary of State. Robert Shaplen, onetime correspondent in the Far East, demonstrates in A Forest of Tigers that the novelist holds cards the diplomat could never hope to draw. The proving ground is Indo-China around 1950, when the Communists had fully shown their hand but had not yet begun their big push. How was the U.S. to handle its difficult French allies, faction-ridden Viet Nam, the everlasting intrigue, the demagogic appeal of the Reds...
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...
...Novelist Shaplen's setting is authentic. His Saigon is hot, and more oppressive than the heat is the sense of deceit, mistrust and danger. Communist terrorists 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...
...sister), he had packed in the parishioners at Brooklyn's big Plymouth Church for 23 years. Then, at 57, and at the peak of his influence, he was accused of practicing what he preached against. "On the night of July 3, 1870,'' writes Author Robert Shaplen. "Elizabeth Richards Tilton, a small, dark-haired woman of 35, the mother of four children, confessed to her husband, Theodore, that she had committed adultery with her pastor, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher...