Word: poplar
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Late one afternoon in May, a large group of people wearing name tags gathered under the shade of a giant tulip poplar tree on the south terrace of Monticello. As the last of the day's tourists were taken by shuttle bus down the winding, single-lane road leading away from the hilltop home, this lingering band nibbled on cheese cubes and sipped red wine as they admired the building's imposing white columns and soaring rotunda. These lingerers were more than tourists, more than guests. They were Jefferson's family. Many breathed a sigh of relief that the 90?...
...scope but not in themes. Religion, race, fame, death--Smith hits all the biggies here, and nearly every major character has a theory about at least one of them. Alex, for instance, is compiling a book that divides the world into people and things with "Jewish" traits (including poplar trees, Jimmy Stewart and John Lennon) and "goyish" traits (including oak trees, Elvis fans and the Jewish troubadour Leonard Cohen). It's inspired by a Lenny Bruce riff, the novel's epigraph, but it becomes a predictable dog-people-vs.-cat-people dichotomy. In her narrative Smith acknowledges and dismisses...
...Made of poplar, probably painted white...
With its hardened shell and oversize antennae, it looks like a cockroach with antlers. But the Asian long-horned beetle is no ordinary menace. It's a hungry tree-eating machine with no natural predators and a hankering for U.S. hardwoods-maple, poplar, birch, elm, ash, horse chestnut and willow. The first specimens came to the U.S. as stowaways in wooden packing crates from China and Hong Kong. The beetles turned up in Brooklyn, N.Y., six years ago, in Chicago two years later and in New York City's Central Park this winter, and have already destroyed thousands of trees...
...scan through them in our recollections, a car radio searching for a clear station. The century starts off blue: Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads. Then the jazz age: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and, later on, Benny Goodman and "Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." Midcentury, things start to rock with Chuck Berry, "Wop-bop-a-loo-bop a-lop bam boom!" the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, "a hard rain's a-gonna fall," Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder. It might be better to forget the '80s--the posturing heavy-metal bands, Debbie Gibson...