Word: butchers
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...BUTCHER, by John J. Sack '51. Rinehart...
Former News Editor and Radcliffe Bureau Chief The CRIMSON, John Sack refuses to take this book seriously, steadfastly muttering that "it is a startling revelation of conditions within the meat industry . . . Second only to Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle. He is selling himself short. Sack's Butcher is a mountain, a treacherous Andean mountain given to icefalls and rotten ledges of snow. He tells how a pair of students--members of a Katzenjammer Kids mountaineering expedition from Harvard and Stanford--climbed that mountain in the summer of 1950 and very nearly lost their lives in the process...
...CRIMSON editor Sack had a neat flair for high drama and low humor, too often constricted here within the inelastic form of a news story. He runs afoul of no such limitations in The Butcher. Sack's book splits roughly into halves. The first half outlines the expedition's halting progress to the base of the mountain. It is very funny. He starts from the labor pains of the expedition, when it was busy accumulating radios which refused to work and storing breakfast food--eagerly pressed into the hands of the climbers by an enterprising cereal manufacturer--in the living...
...second part talks about the climbing of the mountain itself, and it is not funny at all. Twice the two men who finally surmounted the Butcher fell off, saved only by some extraordinary skill and guts. Both were severely frostbitten, one staking his life against the tentative Peruvian transportation network in a race to get his frozen feet under medical care. Both men spent a night huddled in a crevasse far up the 21,000 foot mountain, warmed only by the heat of a candle. Sack does a jarringly vivid job of describing first the fight to climb the mountain...
...cathedral and the cardinal's palace." Others argued that the sword-brandishing statue was "too warlike a figure to stand in front of a church." And Peru's inarticulate Indians never saw any reason to glorify the man they still consider no better than a heroic butcher. But the church-front spot for the statue also had its defenders, who thought it a "commanding position from which he could seem to keep watch over the city he had laid out and founded 400 years before...