Word: gavin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...talk to the smart aleck, home-town piano teacher who has great hopes for her future, is sparkling. She obviously will move to London for her piano lessons, he will give chase, and they will marry and have fourteen children--but the movie ends too soon for all this. GAVIN R. W. SCOTT
LIBERATED FRANCE, by Catherine Gavin (292 pp.; St. Martin's; $5), is a concise, highly readable history (1944-53) in which De Gaulle is often the villain, France herself always the heroine. Able Scottish Historian Gavin, who has a sharp gift of phrase and a keen eye for the human touch, can marshal statistics and evoke a spring mood in Paris with equal grace...
...Gavin gathered all the accounts, and soon came to doubt the usual theory that Hannibal and his 37 elephants-of-war tramped up the Rhone tributary that is now called the Isére. Old historians stated clearly that at that time (October), the river was in flood. The Isére does not flood in October, but another tributary, the Durance, does. Another clue in favor of the Durance is that Hannibal was reported to have passed three Gallic tribes. Old records show that their territories became modern dioceses on the Durance...
Next problem for Sir Gavin was to decide which pass was crossed by Hannibal. Old accounts say that from its summit, the invading Carthaginians could see the plains of Piedmont. This ruled out all except three passes. To pick the one that Hannibal took, Sir Gavin used ancient evidence that the army found new snow in the pass and also old snow from the preceding year. Climatological data, based on pollen grains found in ocean-bottom mud, prove that the climate of Europe in Hannibal's time was slightly warmer than it is today. This being the case, only...
While tracing Hannibal through the Alps, Sir Gavin got interested in those elephants: Were they the African, he asked, or the Indian species? A coin-collecting friend gave the answer by showing him Carthaginian coins with big-eared elephants on them. Sir Gavin's conclusion: Hannibal's "tanks" came from Mauritania (Morocco), where elephants were plentiful...