Word: brest
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...record of the ten-day quest-a flight from Florida to Paris, train to Brest and back-comes with an engaging disclaimer. The tale is told, writes Kerouac, "for no other reason but companionship. This book'll say, in effect, have pity on us all and don't get mad at me for writing...
Britain's war against France was in its fourth year-and France controlled most of Europe. At Brest, the French were assembling a formidable invasion force. In London, King George III, the Admiralty and No. 10 Downing Street did not worry much. What power could possibly breach "the nation's legendary wooden walls," the scourge of the oceans, the British fleet? Then, in the spring of 1797, the wooden walls began to come apart...
James Dugan's fine, wry, if somewhat overlong story re-creates the greatest mass mutiny in maritime history. It began in the Channel fleet stoppering Brest, spread like an infection through the anchorages at Spithead and the Nore, up to the North Sea and down 6,000 miles to ships lying off the Cape of Good Hope. Before it sputtered out, the mutineers numbered 50,000, controlled more than 100 vessels, blockaded London, and laid their country naked to her foes. Dugan's scrupulously unemotional narrative does not conceal his conviction that the mutinous seamen were right...
...craggy coast of Brittany juts into the Atlantic like the head of a hungry snapping turtle. Ragged with reefs and studded with wind-worn, prehistoric monuments, it is one of France's poorest but most picturesque regions. Even the names are striking: Brest and Quimper, Kernascléden and Morbihan-echoes of the Celtic invasion from Wales that settled the giant peninsula about 500 A.D. Life is hard and poor, and even the tourist trade is seasonal at best, for tourists come only when the wet, ragged winds from the Channel let up in the summer, and a pale...
...post in which he so relentlessly pressed the fight against Communist guerrillas, scorning all talk of negotiation in Paris, that he was recalled in 1947, whereupon he quit public life in disgust and returned to his monk's habit; of a heart attack; in a monastery near Brest, France...