Word: speaking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...French West Africa's nearly 19 million people, nine million are Moslems, one million Christians, the rest pagan animists. The Negroes alone speak 120 different languages. Just outside the teeming modern city of Abidjan, villagers still slaughter small children and toss their disemboweled bodies into the river to make sure of a good year's fishing. Until this year, Mauritania, whose Berber people call themselves "whites" (Bidanes), felt itself too poor to have a capital of its own: it shared Saint-Louis, which was the capital of black Senegal. In Dahomey, which means "The Belly of Dan," after...
...book, I Met a Traveler (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; $3.50), Fellow Jesuit Kurt Becker describes how Father Phillips, former rector of Shanghai's Church of Christ the King, spent three years (1953-56) in Shanghai cells, for the most part squatting in one position all day, forbidden to speak a word. By refusing to defend himself against any charge ("I know that I am here only because I am a Catholic priest, sir"), he finally thwarted his jailors' attempts to make him "confess...
...Know, Brethren . . ." The Deputy Premier's mission was a sign of the split personality of the new government, which seems to speak with two voices. One voice belongs to Premier el-Kassim, a bachelor and simple soldier who has resolutely avoided the usual pastime of denouncing Israel, or even of damning the U.S. Marine Corps landings in Lebanon ("I do not believe the Americans will engage in any hostilities"). The other voice is that of 39-year-old Aref, onetime military student of El-Kassim's and, significantly, the only other man to know the exact hour...
...blurred them in something called a "documentary novel." But, encysted in a perfunctorily told story in which each character is paraded merely as a type-the grasping peasant, the sadistic Falangist, the hardy old freedom fighter-facts quickly take on the smell of falsity. And ironically, although the authors speak in their introduction of enduring daily police questioning and of being "forced to resort to lies, to cultivate friendships among informers, torturers and murderers" in order to keep faith with friends, there is no evidence of respect for the Spanish people. Good and bad, the little wooden characters are manipulated...
...title, the "Banquet Years," says Author Shattuck, were essentially morbid. In his view they show the connection between modern art and a world that had lost its God and sprawled on the earth with many a gaping hole knocked through it. While the attempt to make four eccentric figures speak for an entire era is muddled, the figures themselves-four characters in search of a historian-provide enough entertaining episodes to make the reader wish he had gone to one of their blowouts...