Word: mccall
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mike McCall tends just a small garden on his quarter-acre plot outside Tampa, Fla. But he owns the Hummer of all yard machines, what he calls a lawn mower on steroids. Cradled in the plush, high-backed seat of his John Deere X595, McCall, 34, manicures his lawn in a quick 20 minutes, smoking a cigar while he cuts the grass--thanks to an automatic transmission, cruise control and power steering that makes one-handed driving a snap. He can plug a CD player into the 12-volt outlet and sip a beverage from the cup holder. There...
...that's not what McCall is doing. Come Halloween, he attaches the wagon to his X595 and takes local kids for hayrides. The halogen headlights proved handy when his mother-in-law came to baby-sit. "It was 9 o'clock at night," McCall says. "The kids were wound up. I was getting aggravated, so I decided to cut the grass." Not everyone, however, is enamored with his Deere. At a recent homeowners' association meeting, a neighbor asked if McCall might recuse himself from a Lawn of the Month contest, owing to the unfair edge his tractor gives him. McCall...
Cupboard finds Ramotswe on the case of a successful businesswoman who wants to know whether her suitors are after her for love or money. As in all the other books, McCall Smith draws heavily on his happy childhood years in what was then Rhodesia. He praises the "quiet decency" of Botswana, which lies just southwest of Zimbabwe and which McCall Smith, whose day job is teaching medical law at the University of Edinburgh, got to know while helping set up the law school in Gaborone in the early '80s. "In Botswana, even in the small transactions of life, people...
...McCall Smith, on extended leave from his job, is prolific. He has written more than 30 children's books (he has two daughters--one at college, the other younger) and a monograph on the criminal law of Botswana. A new series of books about Isabel Dalhousie, a female gumshoe in Edinburgh, is well under way; the first installment, The Sunday Philosophy Club, is due out in September. A satirical novel about academics, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, is expected in early 2005. And the sixth Ramotswe book is already finished. How does he manage it all? "I'm very lucky," he says...
...growing fame is not so easily dispensed with. But it has its upside, celebrity fans. At yet another literary-society gathering, this one in Beverly Hills, Calif., McCall Smith had a very-not-traditionally built gate crasher, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. "I noticed Mr. Flea had the word LOVE tattooed across his right hand," he said later. "Many of my readers do not. It's nice to have a variation." Politely put, as ever...