Word: mountains
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Cross a mist-shrouded mountain pasture pitted with craters, past four dead horses eviscerated by scavengers, over a trampled barbed wire fence and you are in Kosovo. A thin trail leads down through light green scrub oak to a rutted dirt road, which in turn winds deeper into the cleft of a narrow valley. The mighty crash of 110-mm mortar rounds resounds from the hillsides, interspersed with the delicate crack of Kalashnikov rifles. Wisps of munitions smoke mix with the low mountain clouds spreading over the Dukadjin plains in the distance. About a mile and a half in stands...
...noon on June 8, 1924, the 38-year-old English schoolmaster and Alpinist George Leigh Mallory, along with a young companion, an Oxford engineering student and oarsman named Andrew ("Sandy") Irvine, 22, vanished into the mists surrounding the summit of 29,028-ft. Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain, never to be heard from again...
...years their disappearance has loomed, like Everest itself, as both a challenge and a mystery, made all the more memorable by Mallory's classic retort when asked why he wanted to risk all to climb the far-off mountain: "Because it is there." But did he make it to the top? Or did he falter just short of his goal? Last week an expedition led by veteran American climber Eric Simonson, retracing Mallory's old route on Everest's Tibetan, or north, face, seemed to be tantalizingly close to some definitive answers...
...does become uninteresting: one begins, at times, to wish for a hint of lives that are not being slowly ground down. But these are remarkably few weak points in a collection of 11 stories: and in stories like "The Half-Skinned Steer," "The Mud Below," and, most strikingly, "Brokeback Mountain," Proulx reasserts herself with a force that has grown and become refined since the fine Heartsongs collection. She has developed herself as a chronicler of memory, and her protagonists in these stories are more psychologically compelling than even the strongest characters in Heartsongs. The past bleeds silently and met seamlessly...
...began to sound like a dinner bell, and by the time negotiations on the "emergency funding" bill wound up Thursday night, the special interests had piled on. Now it's a sloppy $14.7 billion porker -- complete with a controversial permit for a gold mine on a pristine Washington State mountain and $3 million to aid commercial reindeer herders in Alaska. It could have been worse. Some $270 million in supports for oil, gas and steel companies had to be yanked at the last minute, for fear that Clinton would have declared "enough" and vetoed the bill outright...