Word: arounders
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Thousands of Argonauts found bitter disappointment in California; other thousands died without ever getting there. Those who chose the long trip around Cape Horn (best time: 89 days) risked storms and shipwreck; on the land-and-water route via the Isthmus of Panama (33 to 35 days), the perils included yellow fever and cholera. By the Overland and Santa Fe Trails, over which 50,000 traveled in 1849 alone, the trip could take all spring and all summer-and the gold seeker, plodding onward beyond the alkali desert in the Humboldt Valley, thought himself lucky to get across the Sierras...
...collection begins with pastoral glimpses of California, includes the early accounts of the discovery of gold, and scenes along the various routes-the Lassen Road, the Salt Lake-Los Angeles road, the southwestern route through Santa Fe, Tucson and Fort Yuma, the route across the Isthmus, the voyages around the Cape. It includes as well such unexpected items as eleven pages of the work of two Cuban artists, Augusto Ferran and Jose Baturone, whose quaintly bearded, drunken and belligerent miners, drawn from life in San Francisco, bear a vague resemblance to the Seven Dwarfs...
...wanders wayward through the past, remembering all that a reader must know to understand what is to come, but also remembering such things as a day when she was a little girl, lying in the grass: "The heat waved over tier hands and face and the air rippled all around her in little rings and circulations of summer tunes. She put out a finger to deflect an emerald beetle climbing a blade of grass and watched it spread its pretty double wings and fly away; there was a long procession of ants running toward an anthill; spiders spun webs...
...Murder Around the Tree. Most of the second half is a good deal less feminine and less successful. When Writer Bolton switches from memory to action, and from past to present, her pen seems to catch a bit of fuzz, her prose blurs a little, and the feelings of the son, his ex-wife and her new husband fog up. And her last-minute attempt to knit the son's tragedy to the world situation is a piece of synthetic, Freudian chop-logic as far-fetched as saying that a tug on an umbilical cord will ultimately release...
...action of the climactic murder scene, with Mother Danforth's family gathered around the Christmas tree, is powerfully done, without a trace of fuzz on the pen or fog in the eye. Yet Miss Bolton's is a lyric, not a dramatic talent. Whenever she tries to speak through a character who is not her own kind and her own sex, she loses her firm tone of voice. But, speaking for herself, Author Bolton has much to say. She says it in a style which Mary Britton Miller should have tried sooner...