Word: gals
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Charleston, South Carolina, has always been a city of two tales -- one white, the other black, running parallel, sometimes clashing but seldom touching. That is one reason why Ruthie Bolton's Gal: A True Life (Harcourt Brace; 275 pages; $19.95) is such a remarkable book, for it is the result of an unlikely collaboration between two writers -- one black and unpublished, the other white and well established. Gal is also remarkable as that one-in-a-million unsolicited manuscript that actually gets published. But most impressive is the book itself...
...author of Gal is a 33-year-old former employee at a plant nursery who is the wife of a restaurant worker and the mother of five children. She has adopted the pseudonym Ruthie Bolton to spare her family embarrassment over some of the raw events she writes about. Josephine Humphreys, 49, is a Charleston native and a highly regarded novelist. Her Dreams of Sleep, Rich in Love and The Fireman's Fair have impressed readers and reviewers with their perceptiveness, their quiet humor and their blend of the courtly conservatism and racy spirits that have survived in and around...
...compare Bolton and the Nobel prizewinner may seem farfetched, but the woman behind Gal uses language with a Bellovian zest. She even has something of Bellow's broad moral overview. Gal is not about racism, feminism or victimization. The book enters the darkness of a "no-love family" without self-pity or bitterness and moves steadily toward the light. The sense of authentic experience eagerly seized is sharp on every page...
Companies don't like to apologize -- who does? In the old days they didn't apologize for anything, but now at least they'll say they're sorry for spilling things, like 4 million gal. of diesel fuel on the Pittsburgh area. Ashland Oil made an apology for that in 1988, soon to be followed by Exxon's apology for spreading 11 million gal. on Alaska. For being a few days late with its statement, Exxon was branded a lout...
...rice and sugar -- and are profiting handsomely. The Brandts control the market in flour, which shot up from $43 to $50 a sack, and have a corner on the country's chicken industry. The Mevs family continues to add on to a fuel depot capable of holding 50 million gal. Their cement business is booming as black-market millionaires build new homes. The Madsens are doing big business in humanitarian food at their shipping terminal, and they own the country's main beer factory. To exploit lucrative foreign-exchange deals, two of the capital's leading families -- the Acras...