Word: yarns
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This novel has elephantiasis of the prose glands, but basically it is an anemic little yarn about an English theatrical royal family. Jacy Florister, 27, an ex-child star dangling rebelliously from maternal apron strings, has long wanted to know more about his deceased British father, whom his mother always refers to as "a moron." When poolside sex and liquor kill mother. Jacy quits Hollywood and flies to England to scratch around for his "roots." He not only digs up the Florister clan, a prolific, Barrymoreish brood whose blood lines rival the "begats," but also the girl of his dreams...
...When Novelist Masters, a former science editor and nephew of Poet Edgar Lee Masters, suggests that postwar America "lost control" of the bomb in the same way that the scientist-hero let his experiment slip, he comes close to losing control of his story. He has, nevertheless, loaded the yarn with authentic inside-Los Alamos excitement and written the most technically knowing A-bomb novel to date...
...worthy of Melville's Captain Ahab, Richardson takes another submarine straight to Bungo Pete's lair. One stormy night he lures Pete out, torpedoes Pete's tincan and his sucker-bait freighter, and to make vengeance dead sure, rams and sinks all lifeboats. Even when the yarn runs right away with him, Author Beach keeps jamming in the authentic details, the tingling stress, the sweaty crush, of the submariners' war. This is he-man's, seaman's, reading, with only a dash of home-base romance...
...MOST CONTAGIOUS GAME, by Samuel Grafton (256 pp.; Doubleday; $3.75), is a fast, offbeat little yarn about a magazine reporter who is handed a money belt with $5,000 and told to sink into the New York City underworld in order to write an exposé. Both the underworld and the police promptly mistake Reporter Dan Lewis for a mobster from Kansas City. After taking a brutal beating, he is put to bed by a brunette bit of fluff who soon climbs in with him. Dan becomes a bodyguard for a gambling czar, kills a man, takes over a bookie...
...South manufacturers of chenille bath mats started making full-scale cotton rugs with fast tufting machines in which 730 huge needles did the work of the old-fashioned looms. Instead of a bobbin and shuttle, the new machines pushed loops of yarn back and forth through a mat like a sewing machine, and did it seven to eight times faster than looms...