Word: monumental
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These desert detours may not look like much, but they pass through the brand-new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah--a 1.7 million-acre tract that many consider the most beautiful spot in the U.S. The trails that crisscross it are scars from the latest tactic in one of the region's most bitter land wars...
...battle began in earnest during the fall presidential campaign, when Bill Clinton headed west and ceremonially conferred monument status on this huge stretch of Utah real estate. Tourists and locals could continue to use the area for hunting, camping and grazing, he said. But he wanted disfiguring activities like mining forbidden...
Thanks for nothing, say many people in Utah. "This is the most arrogant gesture I have seen in my life," says Bill Howell, executive director of the Utah Association of Local Governments. In the town of Kanab, just outside the monument, shops and schools closed in protest, and residents released black balloons into the air. Local artists were more blunt: a popular cartoon circulating for a time pictured the President mutely mooning the state of Utah...
...Indeed, the 25-in. by 31-in. canvas has a long, troubled history. Supposedly painted by the penniless artist just days before his suicide on July 27, 1890, the work was estimated at $40 million in the late 1980s. But in 1989 the French government declared it a "national monument" and forbade its exportation, thus torpedoing its worth on the international art market. Collector Jacques Walter auctioned it off to banker Jean-Marc Vernes for $11 million in 1992; he then sued the French government for "spoliating" its value, and, incredibly, Walter won $29 million in compensation. After Vernes died...
...where are all the books?" I talked with my friends, and no one I knew had ever actually found a book there. My mission would be to find sometbing to verify that Widener was a library and not a fraudulent tourist attraction like the "John Harvard" statue, a monument to a student whom the faculty thought looked cool...