With this unpromising start, Mr Bjørneboe was able, by his second novel, a study of collaboration in wartime Norway, to make himself even less popular in his home country. With the publication of The Least of These, called by Sigurd Hoel, "the most important Norwegian novel since the war", the author completed the process of making himself persona non grata in the Scandinavian countries. The Least of These has been printed in six languages, and although he enjoys a considerable reputation as a poet, Mr Bjørneboe's book has been roundly condemned by educators wherever it has appeared. The fate of the little boy, Jonas, crushed by the enforced conformity of his education, is not, the author says, the central theme of the novel. "All the important persons in this novel are different variations of Jonas - all of them are Jonases. The theme of the book is not the boy Jonas, but the 'being a Jonas.'"

    Its depiction of the nightmarish journey of the unskilled laborer Hilarion and his wife from the slums of Port-au-Prince to the cane fields of the Dominican Republic has brought comparisons to the work of Emile Zola, Andre Malraux, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway.Alexis, whose mother was a descendant of the Revolutionary General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was already a mature thinker when he published General Sun, My Brother (Compere General Soleil) in France in 1955. A militant Marxist himself, Alexis championed a form of the "marvelous realism" developed by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who called for a vision of historical reality from the standpoint of slaves for whom the supernatural was as much a part of everyday experience as were social and other existential realities.General Sun, My Brother opens as Hilarion is arrested for stealing a wallet and imprisoned with an activist named Pierre Roumel--a fictional double for the novelist Jacques Roumain--who schools him in the Marxist view of history. On his release, Hilarion meets Claire-Heureuse and they settle down together. Hilarion labors in sisal processing and mahogany polishing while his partner sets up a small grocery store. After losing everything in a criminally set fire, the couple joins the desperate emigration to the Dominican Republic. Hilarion finds work as a sugarcane cutter, but the workers soon become embroiled in a strike that ends in the "Dominican Vespers," the 1937 massacre pf Haitian workers by the Dominican army. The novel personifies the sun as the ally, brother, and leader of the peasants. Mortally wounded in crossing the Massacre River back into Haiti, Hilarion urges Claire-Heureuse to remarry and to continue to work for a Haiti where people can live in dignity and peace.

    A young scientist studying in the Sahara Desert, he was granted permission to conduct an expedition in the “cold desert" around the North Pole. There he would be living among the northernmost people of the world, the Polar Eskimos of Thule, Greenland.The men of Thule were a race apart. Through geographical isolation and the social planning of Greenlandic Eskimo explorer Knud Rasmussen, they had managed for decades to maintain an advanced, self-sufficient Inuit culture independent of their colonial masters, the Danes. They were truly kings: strong individualists, heroic hunters. Yet they continued to maintain a form of pure communalism, sharing food, property, labor — even offspring and sexual mates. Thievery was practically unknown among them. In all of Greenland there was no jail.This is the society into which Jean Malaurie was granted intimate entry for one historic year. His experience was the last of a kind for at the end of that year the U.S. government built a huge military base in the middle of Thule Eskimo territory. The isolation was over: the modern world had won,Rarely has a book come to the English-speaking public with such advance status: translated into sixteen languages, with encomiums from adventurers, naturalists, and scholars alike, with worldwide sales in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Some readers have hailed the anecdotal side of Eskimo life depicted here; others the harrowing adventures such as the crossing to Canada by dogsled; still others the profound understanding of the Inuit character or the stirring account of Eskimo regeneration in the seventies and eighties.Like the great Eskimo adventure books from decades past—by Elisha Kent Kane, Frederick Cook, Robert Peary — The last Kings of Thule continues the saga of man’s triumph in the Arctic. More than those works, it paints for us the exemplary life of the polar Eskimos as they were—and are becoming again. Jean Malaurie’s portrait is not only a lesson and inspiration for the 100,000 Eskimos in the United States, Canada, Greenland, and the USSR, but a human model for all mankind.

    The Alexandrian War, which deals with troubles elsewhere also, may have been written by Aulus Hirtius (ca. 90-43 BCE, friend and military subordinate of Caesar), who is generally regarded as the author of the last book of Caesar's Gallic War. The African War and the Spanish War are detailed accounts clearly by officers who had shared in the campaigns. All three works are important sources of our knowledge of Caesar's career.The Loeb Classical Library edition of Caesar is in three volumes.