Word: finne
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...magnolia land. He has written a boozy-bucolic picture postcard reminiscence of his North Carolina boyhood. In Author Ruark's memory-misted eyes the Old Man (Ned Hall) is a cross between Thoreau and Natty Bumppo, and the Boy (Robert Chester Ruark Jr.) a blend of Huck Finn and Hemingway's Nick Adams. Less affected readers may feel that they are merely reading the diary of a bad boy scout spending an endless hunting-and-fishing trip with a garrulous, overage camp counselor...
When the New York Board of Education dropped Huckleberry Finn from the list of approved textbooks for elementary and junior high school it deprived thousands of children of a chance to read one of the finest books ever written in this country and an all-time childhood classic. More important, it is an unfortunate example in minority censorship. The step, like the earlier panning of authors suspected of a pink tinge, represents a movement away from thoughtful and provocative education and toward an insipid parochialism in the public schools...
...partially forgotten. While direct protest did not cause the board's action publishers learned that bowdlerized editions still hurt too many feelings. The crux of the matter is that, while education should try to give some emotional security, its primary object is development of the free mind. Since Huckleberry Finn serves that object well, ignorance is a high price for protecting feelings which, if aided by mature understanding, would not be hurt anyway...
Huckleberry Finn is not a Ku Klux Klan pamphlet. To drop this book from the textbook list is a shortsighted educational policy. Surely this acknowledged classic presents life in terms universal enough to out-weigh its incidental provincial slants. Let the latter be considered in historical terms and not taken as a contemporary affront...
...River Stay 'way from My Door, it is brother Ira's harum-scarum pal "V.R." who puts the town in a tizzy by seeming to drown in the Skunk River. Unlike Mark Twain, who allowed Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to attend their own funeral after a similar drowning escapade, Author Kentfield arranges a highly un-Twainlike denouement. Seems that V.R. had swum the river to scare one of the town tomgirls into granting him her favors. In a third story that brakes compassion just short of tears, Ira himself leaves his mother lonely and heartbroken by bolting...