Word: berge
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...PERKINS: EDITOR OF GENIUS by A. Scott Berg Dutton; 498 pages...
Biographer A. Scott Berg, who began this project as a Princeton senior thesis eight years ago, thus had to struggle with his subject, trying to make a hero out of a man who always fancied himself a spear carrier. In preparation, Berg sifted through Perkins' massive correspondence, including an unsuspected cache of platonic and rather wistful love letters to a younger woman, and interviewed everyone he could find who had a Perkins anecdote to tell. The result is a draw. Perkins emerges as both anonymous and heroic...
...Berg includes far too many familiar anecdotes about the depressions and binges of Perkins' famous authors. A law should be passed, in particular, banning any retelling of the booze-soaked Fitzgerald legend for at least 30 years. But it is easy to see why Berg had to fall back on these dog-eared tales. The dramas in Perkins' life occurred in solitude. The thing that distinguished this editor from thousands and thousands of other industrious office workers was a private, inaccessible gift. He could read a manuscript and see the book that the author had hoped to write...
While the Coast Guard watches Alaska's "growlers," British scientists are tracking something bigger: a 768-sq.-mi. Antarctic iceberg adrift in the South Atlantic and heading slowly for Africa. But the penguin-inhabited berg, 36 times the size of Bermuda, poses no threat to shipping; it should break up and melt as it hits warmer waters...
...talk. The Saudis are currently spending $15 billion on the largest desalination program in the world?and seriously pondering a plan for towing icebergs from the Antarctic to provide fresh water for a country that has not a single permanent river. The estimated cost of that: $80 million per berg. They are putting up $14 billion for a project that will bring natural gas to the newly planned industrial cities of Yanbo on the Red Sea and Jubail on the Persian Gulf, which are costing $30 billion to build. In the past three years, the Saudis have built nearly...