Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Crazy like Napoleon. Margaux has picked up the fashion world and wrapped it round her little finger; she has tamed the press and subdued Madison Avenue. "It's like a fairy tale," she agrees. "But blah blah, woof woof, as Jimi Hendrix used to say." Says Miss Mary, Ernest Hemingway's widow (and Margaux's step-grandmother): "She was such a nice healthy kid, I hope nothing spoils her, natch." About her publicity-hating grandfather, Margaux is admiringly respectful, exulting: "Grandpa's spirit's in my marrow." But she prefers people to realize that...
Apparently, the greater a star's candle power, the dimmer the biographer need be. As proof, see Donald Zee's Sophia (McKay; $8.95). By now, Sophia Loren's ascent from the rubble of Naples to the gold of Carlo Ponti should be as familiar as the tale of the princess and the frog. But to Zec, a British journalist, each incident, each phrase, is worthy of a marble bas-relief: " 'Sometimes I felt I wasn't having the baby for Carlo; I was having it for the world,' smiled Sophia." After such reportage...
Richard Adams is a small, white-haired, opinionated Englishman who's "on tour now and working hard at it." He enjoys telling the "actually very well known story" about the origins of Watership Down, how his children persuaded him to write down the tale, how publisher after publisher rejected it because it was too long and intricate to be children's literature. His eyes gleam, and it's impossible to interrupt him as he goes over the history of the two children's fiction awards (about this time his agent, a rather large woman, stops paying attention to the interview...
...mediating between federal housing policy and local sensibilities. This strong dose of reality perhaps explains the difference between England's two most famous modern fantasies-Watership Down and J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkein, a professor of English, invented a whole mythological world for his fairy-tale creatures to inhabit; they in turn, are more concerned with forces of good and evil than with practical necessities like food, clothing, and shieter. Adams's rabbits, on the other hand, are part of the natural world of the English countryside-their enemies are bulldozers and carnivores and bad weather...
...uncommonly successful mixture of fact and fiction. Far Tortuga is a treatise on turtling, an account of the dying days of sailing ships on unspoiled waters, and a history of a locale that winter tourists tripping through the Caribbean rarely see. Most memorably, it is a spare adventure tale about simple men driven to the extremities of pain and death by ignorance, greed, weakness and inexplicable fate. ∙Paul Gray