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Nevil Shute Norway, who wrote under the name Nevil Shute, is not much studied in literature courses, nor are there many articles and books about him; but his annual income from royalties was extensive, and most of his twenty-four books are still in print...

Recently, I found myself sitting at a small, child-size table at a hotel in Istanbul with a short but well-built 44-year-old American wearing pookah shells. He was a native New Yorker—grew up in Rockland County, spent weekends at his grandparents in Brooklyn—but had lived for...

A boy who was bitten multiple times by a Rottweiler running free on a Hawaiian beach was awarded $856,000 by a jury that concluded the dog's owner was negligent.Keeton Manguso, who was 2 1/2 years old and weighed 24 pounds when he was bitten on...

For the past week, the residents of Fiesta Beach have included uptight horses, frightened finches and designer dogs — as well as pet owners trying to make it all seem like home.The island in Mission Bay became an animal refuge after wildfires broke out last...

Q. I plan to take my MP3 player, digital camera and cell phone to the beach this summer. How can I protect them from damage?A. If you follow a few commonsense tips, you can hit the sand and surf with most of your portable electronics...

On the Beach was the first book of Nevil Shute's I ever read and I confess that it influenced my outlook on the problem of nuclear war and human survival. Until then I secretly believed that such a world catastrophe could never happen. Mankind was too rational to destroy itself. Like many others, this did not prevent me from being active against war, but always with a certain emotional reservation, founded mainly on historical and political optimism. Nevil Shute's book, while not demolishing t...

The basic idea for what would become On the Beach grew out of the wishful thinking then current in Australia: that radiation from a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere would be held above the equator by the trade winds. Shute's first intention seems to have been to write a kind of modern Swiss Family Robinson about the continuation of civilization in Australia…. The idea for the book "started as a joke," Shute told a friend. "Now that I was living in Australia I kidded ...

[In On the Beach] Shute portrays the end of all men upon earth. Not on a planetary or cosmic scale, but through the eyes and hearts of utterly convincing persons, Shute carries the reader to the radioactive death of man, after a third world war. The story and its motion picture are by now well known to many of us. And we have all shared in the pain-filled pages of the novel. It is what lies beyond or beneath the obviously depressing portrayal that makes this work something more than a story well told. When ...