Word: forte
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...those with skills that transfer, the adjustment can also be difficult. George Duden, 36, formerly at Chrysler, likes his new job as an electrical engineer with Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth. But as is often the case with those who leave the unionized North, he took a cut in pay and benefits-partly offset by lower taxes. Texas living, says his wife Susan, 29, is expensive, and their son "misses fishing in the Michigan lakes." Though Texans are friendly, Duden notes, "Amy Vanderbilt never got west of the Mississippi. There are rough edges down here...
...polyethylene and burlap and divided into roughly 45-lb. bales-and the erstwhile smugglers will be turned over to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Colombian gold, which burns at such high heat that it can ruin conventional incinerators, will most probably become free fuel, stoked into the furnaces of Fort Lauderdale's power company to provide electricity...
...observes Biographer William McFeely with mordant pragmatism, "is a way out of a leather store." Certainly it was that for Ulysses S. Grant, who was clerking in a family shop in Galena, Ill., when the Civil War ignited the U.S. Grant was 38 when the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, and he had distinguished himself only briefly as a soldier: in combat, as an eager young West Pointer in the Mexican War, and as an enterprising peacetime quartermaster who led a hapless party of California-bound travelers across the Isthmus of Panama...
...from the East talked him out of $1,500 for a partnership, gulled him into destroying the notes and soon absconded. On Army duty in the Pacific Northwest, he sought to make some side money raising potatoes for hungry settlers; the Columbia River flooded his fields. Posted to bleak Fort Humboldt on the California coast, Captain Grant pined for his wife Julia, the daughter of a Missouri country gentleman, and their two small boys. Depression led to drink, but it was the loneliness, not liquor, that prompted him to resign his commission. Working his father-in-law's land...
...McFeely's analysis of the extraordinary life of an ordinary man. Later some would hail Grant as "the Liberator," but in fact conflict liberated him. The veteran officer was a brigadier general by August 1861, a major general the following February after winning the unconditional surrender of Fort Donelson in Tennessee. Grant soon perceived that the war meant annihilation. He pursued that vision personally in bloody battles at Vicksburg, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, and more remotely when he commanded Philip Sheridan to leave the Shenandoah Valley "a barren waste...