Word: hersey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...FIRE: On May 29, Hyperion will publish "Firehouse" by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Halberstam. The book will be a portrait of Engine 40 Ladder 35 on W. 66th Street, which lost 12 men in the WTC attack. According to the publisher, "In the tradition of John Hersey?s ?Hiroshima,? Halberstam tells the story of the community within this firehouse, before, during and after the cataclysmic events of September 11th." The book grew out of an article commissioned by Vanity Fair, where Halberstam is a contributing editor...
...ignition of trench-coat wanderlust, their minds flickering in black and white for a moment, a few frames of '30s movies. Daniel Pearl, I gather, had the gleam. A sheer avidity to know things is the most endearing trait of any journalist. Long ago, the novelist and journalist John Hersey wrote in a sketch of Henry Luce, "He was amazed and delighted to learn whatever he had not known before." Curiosity is the noblest form of intellectual energy; in any case, your mind goes nowhere without it - except maybe to fanaticism...
...have surmised, I'm not buying any explanation for taking another person's words or ideas, partly because words and ideas are what make us individuals. This is why it is mystifying when one learns of such former borrowers as John Hersey or Alex Haley. These were people who defined their lives by the words they made. What laziness or madness could possibly explain their deliberately wearing someone else's mind? Frankly, if you want to appropriate someone else's ideas, I'd prefer cloning...
...retired, is one of the trackers who dragged boats upstream through the Gorges in the days before motor transport became standard. Although trackers haven't worked the Yangtze for more than a decade, they are immortalized in legend and song, and by authors in the West such as John Hersey and Paul Theroux. We have come to Chen's home in Daxi in part because of Hersey's 1956 novel, A Single Pebble, which vividly describes the Qutang trackers' path, a narrow walkway carved into the cliff wall. Hersey calls it "the most terrible place on the whole river...
...Seven Gate Cave we stop to rest. From here it's an hour to Baidicheng village, which has easy bus connections to the ancient city of Fengjie at the start of the Gorges. I find myself thinking about the climax of Hersey's novel, in which a tracker falls to his death in Windbox Gorge. A few weeks ago a Chinese journalist died after plunging from a similar trail in another gorge. The path was good, but it was raining and he slipped. Nevertheless, Chen assures me that in the old days skilled trackers rarely got hurt. And he cautions...