SOURCE: A review of The Shrapnel Academy, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 19, 1987, pp. 2, 8.

In the following review, Seidenbaum offers reserved praise for The Shrapnel Academy, noting that because of the novel's extreme violence and cynicism it is for those with "strong stomachs."

This [The Shrapnel Academy] is an explosive little novel, to English drawing room comedy what the Hindenburg was to zeppelin flight.

Shrapnel Academy, a well-endowed mythic military school named after the man who invented the exploding cannon-ball, gathers a sort of numskulls' Noah's Ark for the annual Eve-of-Waterloo dinner. Gen. Leo Makeshift, oafish but agreeable, will deliver the Wellington lecture; Bella Morthampton, his secretary in title but his mistress in fact, will devour the tough caribou patties from a 1794 Canadian recipe; Mew Whittaker will be mistaken for a Times of London correspondent when, in reality, she represents the ferociously feminist Women's Times. Fold in...