Word: laddered
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Days after the birth, Koernke joined the 70th Division (training), U.S. Army Reserve based in Livonia, Michigan. Later, as he climbed the ladder of the Patriot right, he traded heavily on his purported military-intelligence experience, calling himself an "intelligence analyst and counterintelligence coordinator" with a top-secret clearance, and afterward the commander of two "special-warfare" brigades used to "train U.S. military in foreign warfare and tactics." However, judging from a summary of his service record provided by the Army and anecdotes from soldiers familiar with him, his claims seem inflated. He did attend the Army's intelligence school...
Deputy Chief Reardon said that four fireengines, two ladder trucks, two rescue operationvehicles as well as Cambridge and Harvard policeresponded to the incident
Thanks to the magic of Anne Tyler's fiction, Delia Grinstead, the heroine of Ladder of Years (Knopf; 326 pages; $24), is largely freed from such constraints. Married straight out of high school to a doctor 15 years her senior, Delia now finds herself in a comfortable Baltimore home with three nearly grown children and no intelligible reasons for staying where she is. She reads paperback romances out of boredom and feels excluded from the fun. "She was," she tells herself, "a sad, tired, anxious, forty-year-old woman who hadn't had a champagne brunch in decades...
Novelists have not always been kind to runaway wives-Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, for example. But Tyler (whose novels include The Accidental Tourist and Morgan's Passing) again blesses her subject with a comic sensibility. The world of Ladder of Years is not one where acts produce serious moral consequences. Delia reads of her disappearance in the newspaper: "A slender, small-boned woman with curly fair or light-brown hair, Mrs. Grinstead stands 5'2" or possibly 5'5" and weighs either 90 or 110 pounds." Her understandable response: "For heaven's sake, hadn't anyone in her family...
...half on her own, will she be lured back to Baltimore for good? The suspense is enjoyable but not nearly as pleasing as watching Tyler skim so stylishly over the surface of some decidedly troubled waters. There is a sitcom quality to much of what goes on in Ladder of Years, but Tyler mixes some bitter with the sweet and leaves the laugh track to the reader...