Word: conrades
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Across the continent, in Oakland, Calif., Charlie's decision falls like doom on Conrad Hensley, 23, the married father of two who has a $14-an-hour job on the night shift hauling frozen food out of a Croker Global warehouse to waiting delivery trucks. Conrad is someone new in a Wolfe novel, a totally good person who wants nothing more out of life than to buy a modest condominium for his family and establish a well-ordered, bourgeois existence. After the most riveting fictional scene ever set in a 0[degree]F freezer unit--here the competition is nonexistent...
Wolfe's novel is bound by the inevitably intertwining paths of Charlie and Conrad, but that circumference is swollen by a series of related subplots, conveyed through the thoughts of three other characters. Raymond Peepgass, 46, a senior loan officer at PlannersBanc, has an inside view of Charlie's financial mess and thinks he may be able to dip surreptitiously into all that sloshing debt. Then there is Martha Croker, 53, still reeling from the breakup of her nearly 30-year marriage to Charlie. Now that she is no longer seen on the arm of her husband, her old Atlanta...
This is not genre writing, agreeable trash to be pigeonholed. If salt-soaked comparison is required, O'Brian's adventures suggest Joseph Conrad's sea tales more than those of C.S. Forester and his Horatio Hornblower. Conrad's prevailing mood is darker; though O'Brian can summon darkness and defeat, he is more arch and owlish. But as Forester did, O'Brian novelizes serially. The precarious lives of two memorable characters, friends and shipmates, thread through his books...
...sites are only a fraction of what archaeologists believe remains to be found. La Aleta, for example, was part of the chiefdom of Higuey, one of the Taino's richest, most populous and politically powerful territories. "What other sites were connected with it?" wonders Indiana University archaeologist Geoffrey Conrad. "What did the environment look like 500 years ago? I have a list of questions that I'll never live to see answered." Other scholars will come along to fill in the gaps, though. And even if it takes another century to understand the Taino fully, they have already been rescued...
...Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad...