Word: perfective
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...later be famous, although nobody had any idea at the time. One is a tiny baby sitting in his mother's lap. The other is a smiling, tough-looking, pompadoured fellow standing behind her. The baby would grow up to be Sebastian Junger, the mega-selling author of The Perfect Storm, the true story of a fishing boat lost at sea. The smiling guy was a handyman named Albert DeSalvo. History would come to know him as the Boston Strangler...
...call en route to his home in New York City. Junger is by trade a prowler of battlefields and wildernesses, and his placid, well-heeled hometown was not the most obvious starting point. "I liked the idea partly because it was the exact opposite kind of story from The Perfect Storm," he says. "It's not an adventure story. There are no 100-ft. waves. And I just frankly wanted to know what happened...
DeSalvo, on the other hand, was a nightmare straight out of Thomas Harris. Born into a violent home in a rough neighborhood, he was a perfect storm of another kind--handsome enough to talk his way into women's homes, sick enough to rape and kill, smart enough to cover his tracks afterward. "All I know is that something would happen and I would have my arms around their necks," he told an investigator. (Junger makes extensive and creepily effective use of police transcripts.) DeSalvo sometimes posed his victims after the crime for shock value and left the victim...
...DeSalvo's dark world, Junger's clear, beautifully reasonable writing is the literary equivalent of night-vision goggles. In The Perfect Storm Junger had a great story to work with; in A Death in Belmont there is no central thread. He's navigating a maze of shadows, and you can see all the more clearly what an enormously skillful prose artist he is. Absent a pulse-pounding narrative, Junger entrances the reader by picking out small details--like the score of the kickball game being played in front of Goldberg's house when she died--that give the events...
...place of much water"?would have been their favorite bit (after his leopard-print underwear, of course). Stretching for 80 km along the Garden Route coastline is a verdant carpet of fynbos (Afrikaans for fine bush) and towering hard pear and Outeniqua yellow wood trees. It's also the perfect setting for those who like their outdoor experiences spiked with adrenaline: harnessed and helmeted nature lovers can whiz through the Tsitsikamma's treetops by strapping themselves onto a web of steel cables threaded through the forest canopy. Biologists studying the flora and fauna in the Costa Rican cloud- and rain...