Word: porch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ulysses Grant sat on the porch and marched armies across his memory. He called them up through cocaine and morphine, through the pain in his throat, and into a perfect clarity of prose. He fought the war minutely all over again: Shiloh and Vicksburg, the slaughters of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, where men were so sure of death that they pinned their names and addresses on their jackets for easy identification when they fell. And at last, the mythy set piece of Appomattox, where Lee came as the elegant last cavalier, and Grant, a shabby cigar stub...
Grant remembered it all on the porch of a cottage at Mount McGregor in the foothills of the Adirondacks in the summer of 1885, 100 years ago. He was dying of cancer. As he sat in a silk top hat, reassembling the past, tourists came to stare at him from a little distance. He let them watch, even wanted them to. So many planes of the public and the private intersected in Grant: the obscure American failure who saved the Union. Now, at the last, the shabby embarrassment who was also the first genius of industrial warfare made the intimate...
...Lonesome Dove would be a dull book if the two remained proprietors of the Hat Creek Cattle Co. & Livery Emporium ("GOATS AND DONKEY'S NEITHER BOUGHT NOR SOLD/WE DON'T RENT PIGS"). It isn't that life in town can't be dangerous. One can always fall off a porch, get snakebit picking up a jug or risk Tex-Mex cooking. The recipe for varmint stew: "Whatever the dogs catch. Or the dogs themselves, if they don't manage to catch nothing...
...Pine Street, Barbara Johnson, wife of Philadelphia Daily News Staff Writer Tyree Johnson, viewed the blaze from her front porch. "You could see the flames, 20, 30 feet above the rooftops, reaching over like blazing fingers, igniting houses first on Osage, then adjacent houses on Pine. Soon a solid wave of flame was sweeping down the street...
...Porch is a professor at a The Citadel, the famous South Carolina military college, and his occasional digressions on tactics can get boring for those who aren't hardcore war nuts. Another annoying Porch tendency is to criticize the actors for making mistakes. "Any man with a sense of self-preservation would have executed an about-face and turned home," he chidingly writes of Paul Flatters, who led the first and second expeditions. As it happens, Flatters is cut down by the Tuareg four pages later. Porch knew it would happen the reader whew it would happen-the chapter...