Word: lat
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...Lat Evans, grandson of Lije, is the central character of These Thousand Hills. He exemplifies the settlers of America's last frontier, the Mountain West, and the establishment there of the Cattle Kingdom. Lat begins his rise as a Montana rancher by breaking away from his religious, impoverished parents and signing up for a cattle drive from Pendleton through Boise to Fort Benton, Montana. In Montana, he turns his winnings in a horse race (Callie, his prostitute mistress loaning the initial capital) into a profitable ranch. The politically ambitious Lat must, however, renounce his shady past and marries a Hoosier...
...Lat Evans, Guthrie has created a plausible and likeable character, a man who symbolizes the major conflict of the frontier, that between the wishes for responsible individualism and for the protection of a developed social organization. His failure as a dramatic creation is, as Callie says, that "You think too much, Lat...
...Hero Lat Evans is 20 in 1880, a little tired of the Oregon his people pioneered, more than a little tired of his God-fearing father, who hugs his Methodism as closely as his near poverty hugs him. Lat heads for the wider spaces of Montana, breaks broncs, hunts wolves, wins a pot on a horse race and finally satisfies his ambition-a ranch of his own. But all the time he progresses in the field of livestock, he is tethered to that stock character of all cowtowns, a prostitute with a heart of gold. Gallic is slim and blonde...
Author Guthrie is still the sensitive, loving researcher more than he is the true novelist. With all its virtues, his story is so commonplace and predictable that the reader cannot help projecting it onto a big screen, with Gary Cooper doing a wonderful job as Lat Evans. But throughout These Thousand Hills there are fine evocations of what the country was like, the authentic sense of place that is Guthrie's trademark. Even the standard brushes with Indians and rustlers have a quality of this-is-how-it-was, and the speech rings as true as the slap...
Five years ago, Crane Operator Henry Ciesla was stricken with amyotrophic lat eral sclerosis, an incurable chronic neurological disease. Paralyzed from the throat down, he was placed in an iron lung at Buffalo's Meyer Memorial Hospital; he was not expected to live more than a year. But Ciesla refused to die. With permanent breathing and feeding tubes in his throat and stomach, he stayed cheerful, watched TV via an overhead mirror. Last week a wall-panel fuse in the hospital blew out, stopped the life-preserving iron lung. Alone in his private room, Henry Ciesla died...