It has been a repeated theme of critics of William Mayne's novels that, while his writing is excellent, it is too difficult for most young readers and will never find a large audience with them. Some critics have even wondered whether the author's...

Reviewing a biography in The New York Times on British arms control advocate and scientist Solly Zuckerman, Charles William "Bill" Maynes Jr. wrote, "One of life's mysteries is why some individuals accomplish so much." Maynes exemplified this mystery: he was a Rhodes Scholar, a...

THE MAYNE INHERITANCE By Rosamond Siemon. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997, pp. xiii + 214. $15.95. This is not the usual sort of History book that might be reviewed in a learned journal -- but such an assertion raises...

Jim ClarkMONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) _ Former Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, whose violent confrontations with voting rights marchers in Selma shocked the nation in 1965 and gave momentum to the civil rights movement, has died. He was 84.Clark, who wore a "Never" button on his...

Former first lady Lady Bird Johnson outlived her husband, Lyndon, by more than 35 years, expanding on her White House efforts to carve her own legacy as an environmentalist.When she died July 11 at age 94, she left behind countless miles of scenic highways across...

William Mayne has never made any concessions to the lazy or inattentive reader: he has never written the fully-automated book. In any case, we cannot all like the same things, and even among books of comparable merit there must always be some that strike a more popular note than others. Nevertheless, the impression of Mayne as a writer of somewhat rarefied excellence—one who operates at a high literary altitude where the air is thin—still persists, and may have some justification. Re-reading m...

[What William Mayne's] writing has shown is that stories for children need not drive straight from opening to end; they can shape themselves by a sort of sly oblique process, emerge sideways and even backwards out of dialogue and hints. In fact, all his stories have strong narrative spines; but they are not rigid ones. He has also come so close to the true nature of children's talk and to the way they feel and think that it must be more difficult than it was for a writer of any sensitiveness t...

In The Unreluctant Years, Lillian H. Smith says "that a new book's claim to stand beside a well-loved favorite rests in the degree to which it possesses the magic of a Lewis Carroll or a Stevenson or a Mark Twain." With what infinite certainty do we realize in Mayne's books that children do things 'with blitheness,' are endlessly searching for lasting truth, and in the process, reveal to us the heart of the matter. "The eager, reaching, elusive spirit of chil...