Books: Back to Borneo

WHITE MAN RETURNS (3 10 pp.)—Agnes Newton Keith—Little, Brown ($4).

It took a moment for returning white men to recognize the little town on the Sulu Sea. All the wood-framed, tin-roofed, prewar houses were gone; sleazy palm-leaf shacks swayed in their places. The flies were thicker, the natives were thinner; only the charring equatorial heat was the same. Nevertheless, Harry and Agnes Keith were glad to be back. Before war and Japanese prison camps, the "dirty, stinking little town" of Sandakan, British North Borneo, was home.

Why the Keiths went back and what they found in postwar Borneo make for a chatty,...

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