Word: carles
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...Carl Lewis July...
...Carl Lewis August...
...does every three years, the INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL UNION has just announced its latest roster of official astronomical names, and as usual, the list is highly eclectic. It's not surprising that CARL SAGAN was honored with a 50-mile-wide crater on Mars. And the names Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Caliban and Sycorax for five moons of Uranus make sense, since the planet's other moons are mostly named for characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Even a moonlet called Petit-Prince is defensible, since it orbits the asteroid Eugenia--and the son of Empress Eugenie and Napoleon III had that...
What happened? That, naturally, is what Carl wants to know when he gets back to the farm. But Amanda will answer only with generalities about some sort of skating accident: "Mattie was always taking chances, always doing things she shouldn't have done, things I told her not to do." Carl doesn't understand why his wife would have left Ruth with her aunt and gone skating on a November night or why Ruth, when he and she are standing together at Mattie's grave, mentions an "ice baby" that she remembers "when I drowned...
...greatest strength of Drowning Ruth is not its tension-building plot but rather its careful portrait of people who must get on with the daily business of living no matter how mystified they are by unanswered questions. Carl realizes that he has a farm to run and a daughter to raise. When Amanda, who has stayed on to become Ruth's surrogate mother, suffers a nervous breakdown and goes to a sanitarium for a year, he nearly loses control of his increasingly wild child. Only when Amanda returns does Ruth settle down and some semblance of normal family life begin...