Word: novel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Aside from the fact that it was the place where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton filmed Graham Greene's novel, The Comedians, Dahomey's chief claim to notoriety is its penchant for coups d'état. Since 1963, the tiny West African state (pop. 2,500,000 in an area of 44,290 sq. mi.) has experienced four coups, all bloodless. Last week Dahomey suffered its fifth coup in six years, but this time the takeover was not bloodless. When President Emile Zinsou, 51, an able, French-trained medical doctor, arrived at his seaside palace...
...Flies, and a spate of imitative books about troubling and precocious children. Since the late '50s and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the picaresque adventures of rebellious youth seeking wisdom through forbidden experience have been the dominant theme. Now, perhaps, William Harrison's superb second novel-about four contemporary graduate students and their suicide pact-may bring the literary wheel full circle to the campus scene again...
Exploring the nature of evil is a preoccupation of the author, who teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Arkansas. In his first novel, The Theologian, a young divinity student seeks salvation through extreme sinfulness. This time, by shaping the image of evil as lover and destroyer, Harrison has traced a remarkable voyage into the world of psychological and social morality for an age which seems to have lost its moral bearings...
After a while, the battle-wan reader may feel he has little to gain by following the fortunes of the local satraps up and down the Peloponnesus in this flagrantly detailed novel about Alexander the Great's first 20 years. Not only is the cast large and devious, but the archaeological displays are as plentiful as prize vegetable exhibits at a fair...
...slightly blinkered view of Alexander. Granting him his historic virtues-precocity, courage, leadership and tactical genius-she dissembles on the crucial matter of his sexuality. After Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaistion (one of his generals) were the best-known best friends of the ancient world. In the novel, however, though the author surrounds her hero with Hephaistion, an overt invert, and a band of other young men, Alexander himself remains pure, sublimated and inevitably prissy. He not only has no faults; he has no appetites, an odd condition for a young hero who, according to popular legend, later wept...