Word: tropics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...while watching him through a few hands of poker. And there have always been novelists who believed that a set of characters would give themselves away dramatically if forced into close, catalytic quarters. Favorite places to bring out the best and worst in people have been ships, planes, hotels, tropic outposts, small combat units, African safaris. It remained for Novelist John (A Bell for Adano, The Wall) Hersey to put his characters to the test in a modern-day woodchuck roundup. None of the people in The Marmot Drive like each other very much to begin with. When Hester comes...
...noble, oil-grimed background. During World War II, he was named chief of the Thirteenth Air Force in the South Pacific, distinguished himself not only as a commander but as a castaway-he spent six days on a raft eating raw albatross and being parboiled by the tropic sun after a 6-17 crash at sea, near Espiritu Santo. He went to Italy, where he commanded the Fifteenth Air Force for 20 months, and then came back to the Pacific as commander of the Twentieth Air Force, whose 6-293 dropped the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
Most Frenchmen have a natural distrust of living anywhere except in France, but the poster swayed the schoolteacher and his wife. It showed a colonial couple, elegant in tropic white, taking their ease in a banana grove, while eager natives bustled at tasks around them. "Young people," assured the poster legend, "a fortune awaits you in the Colonies!" Ma and her husband applied for teaching posts in Indo-China and, one day in 1899, sailed to take them...
...comparison, everything else in the book seems minor, though continually interesting. Inside the Whale is a long, over generous celebration of Novelist Henry (Tropic of Cancer) Miller, in which Orwell sees Miller as a last-ditch individualist thumbing his nose at a mechanized world. England Your England is an impressionistic survey of Orwell's native land, in which he uses such unconventional criteria as the difference between the German's strutting goose step and the English parade step ("merely a formalised walk") to score some shrewd points about the strength of democracy...
...Tastes Like Rabbit. Under the sizzling tropic sun on the way to the prison camp at Pudu, the sense of common humanity melted away; a man saved himself. When a sniveling, fear-crazed sergeant begged to be carried, Gunner Braddon refused, then watched passively while a Jap guard pumped five bullets into the sergeant's stomach at a foot's range. At Pudu, each meal consisted of a handful of pasty rice sometimes crawling with weevils. Whenever he could get them, Author Braddon ate cats, dogs, snakes, grubs, fungus and leaves. He notes that "snake tastes like gritty...