Word: lions
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...write Ghosts of Tsavo (National Geographic; 275 pages), Philip Caputo went down some roads most people would gladly skip. The Tsavo region of Kenya is inhabited by a mysterious breed of lion that has no mane and eats humans as if they were Meow Mix. In one documented case, two lions stalked and killed 135 people during construction of a bridge across the Tsavo River. Joined by a rotating cast of biologists, local tribesmen and scary big-game hunters, Caputo heads into the African scrub to find the lions. This is darkest Hemingway country--the ghost of Francis Macomber haunts...
...reigning literary lion of post-Hemingway travel writers is V.S. Naipaul, who won last year's Nobel Prize for Literature. The Writer and the World (Knopf; 524 pages) brings together his best short work, most of which has been languishing uncollected for decades. A native of the tiny island of Trinidad, Naipaul is a travel writer almost by default--he is a foreigner everywhere he goes--and it's a privilege to look through his outsider's X-ray eyes at Mobutu's Zaire, or at a would-be revolutionary in Guyana, or at a holy man in Bombay...
...words turns Jason's book into a universally accessible meditation on the human condition. Likewise the use of animals as human stand-ins turns the tales into Aesop-like fables with a modern, existential twist. Imagine Buster Keaton in Henrik Ibsen's version of "The Mouse and the Lion." These "fables" all have the same lesson: Life is absurd...
...denizens is "the Chairman," the fictional leader of the Singaporean government during the 1980s, who sometimes changes form to become Mao, father of Chinese communism. While the author never mentions him directly, "the Chairman" appears to be a thinly veiled stand-in for elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew, the Lion City's Prime Minister during the communist purge. Given the Singaporean government's traditional intolerance of critics, it's no surprise Lau has chosen not to introduce Lee as a historical figure in the novel. Instead, she creates a fantasy world that parodies the government's patriarchal policies...
...courts ruled that a better word would be "swiped," and Cash had to pay up. Rufus Thomas's "Bear Cat (The Answer to Hound Dog)," whose composition was credited to one Sam Phillips, was so direct a copy of the Leiber-Stoller hit that Sun had two pay Lion Records two cents a copy. (All this and much more itemized in Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins' book "Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'n Roll...