Word: bric
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...decades, has penned an exciting and timely civic history. In one sumptuous two thousand year sweep, Hughes jettisons the deadness of prose that most readers associate with History and instead writes with the same electric, cobaltblue style that colors his art writing. While presenting an astonishing array of historical bric-a -brac, Hughes also welds together history and culture, politics and architecture, into an incisive textual amalgam...
...Quixote in The Old Cupboard Door, 1889, for instance) are parlor antiquarianism with nothing to say about history. What they respond to is the diffuse sentimentality about the past felt by people ill at ease with the rawness and bustle of the American republic, in the days before bric-a- brac became "collectibles...
...theme suites upstairs are equally preposterous: gold-sprinkled carpets, Jacuzzis in the bedrooms, Egyptian murals in the Cleopatra suite, cherubim on the ceiling of the Michelangelo suite and, in the King Tut suite, lots of the sort of bric-a-brac a king likes to be buried with. Prices start at $250 a night for 1,200 sq. ft. and run to $10,000 for the 4,200-sq.-ft. Alexander the Great suite. But costs are incidental, since most of these luxury accommodations are reserved, on the house, for high rollers. "It has the most beautiful suites that have...
...distinct stages lasting a minute and five seconds, the quaking stunned the populace out of sleep into an incomprehensible terror of showering plaster, scattering bric-a-brac, breaking dishes, shifting furniture, toppling walls and collapsing roofs. Waterfront houses lurched and fell apart, hotels hopped off their foundations. In the working-class district south of Market Street, tenements turned into tangled splinters, and four hotels capsized and collapsed, trapping scores. An added blast rattled the area, as the city gas plant blew up. Thousands of chimneys plunged through roofs. Many residents drowned, trapped, in deluges from ruptured water mains. An elaborate...
Chabon is one in a long line of young novelists to examine the strange bric-a-brac of our day. Unlike Jay McInerney--whose debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was a dirge devoid of rebirth, and set in the heart of the New World jungle, New York City--Chabon retains a Midwestern sensibility and even-mindedness. Chabon's prose can be as funny as McInerney's, but its message is more cheerful...