Word: chunk
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Just as the reader, with more than 700 pages still to march, begins to worry about blisters, the youthful Alessandro takes over the narrative. Here, for a very large chunk of the novel's center, Helprin writes with riotous energy and $ sustained brilliance about boyhood, youth and war. There is a strange, dreamlike adventure in the Alps, when Alessandro at age nine or 10 is caught up in a mountain rescue, then in a preadolescent erotic tangle with an Austrian princess. Later there is a splendid silliness in which he taunts a couple of mounted carabinieri while riding his horse...
...astute, analysis of the Federal Government. Though a draft dodger during Vietnam, he saw firsthand the flaws of the 1960s ethic when the self-styled Balto-Cong raided his underground newspaper in Baltimore and claimed the paper was not radical enough. That, coupled with the fact that a huge chunk of his first paycheck went to the government, began to steer him away from liberalism. "A little government and a little luck are necessary in life but only a fool trusts either of them," writes O'Rourke in Parliament of Whores...
...Saddam's in the final days of the war. With military supplies and arms dwindling after numerous allied strikes, the Iraqis resorted to "an odd bit of desperation," according to a U.S. War College analyst. They launched a Scud missile at Israel that was topped with a 700-lb. chunk of concrete as its "warhead." The dud Scud buried itself harmlessly in the Negev desert...
...fresh load of rockets and grenades, a Soviet-made 122-mm shell exploded several yards away in a lethal burst of metal. Fragments shredded his pants, embedding themselves in his legs. One shard burned its way into his throat. After the field surgeon in Pleiku extracted a chunk close to his jugular vein, an opening the size of a quarter remained in his neck. "I was fascinated by the hole," he says, rubbing the scar. "When I looked in the mirror, I could see my Adam's apple...
...general sales manager at the Checker Cab Company, says the recession is hitting drivers particularly hard in its corporate and tourist aspects: the sense of financial restraint infecting the nation has resulted in less air travel and hotel usage for work and for pleasure, lopping off a significant chunk of taxi business...