Word: porches
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...Douglas Porch's The Conquest of the Sahara, it's not so easy. While the story is told from the perspective of the colonial-French, their swath of death and mutilation across "the world's greatest desert" hardly makes them lovable. On the other hand, their opponents, the Tuareg desert tribesmen and their sometime allies the Chaamba Arabs, are at least as treacherous as the French. No one likes a story without sympathetic characters, and the only ones in Conquest of the Sahara are the nameless Arab and Black peasants and slaves who are robbed, raped, and murdered by both...
...Porch's book centers on the colonial factions in late 19th century France, who, in a race with England, wanted to unite French holdings in the northern, central and western parts of Africa by winning the desert and building a trans-Saharan railroad. The French Army of Africa, a military back water filled with officers either boldly ambitious or lazily complacent--but incompetent either way--was eager for a new opportunity to win glory...
Even if you are into this sort of Kiplingish stuff, it could get tedious it told poorly. Fortunately, Porch expertly recreates what it was like to be there, describing, for example, "large hills of rubbish that were constantly churned and sifted by packs of stray dogs and near-naked children...
...June 30, 1908, reached an altitude of twelve miles, and the blast was heard hundreds of miles away. Those closest to the explosion, the townspeople of Vanavara, 40 miles away, felt a wave of intense heat; windows cracked, objects fell from walls, and one man sitting on his porch was thrown several yards and knocked unconscious. Trees were flattened and scorched over an area of several hundred square miles, their felled trunks all pointing away from the epicenter...
...young son, David. The sounds that come from the Dinn's house during the course of the summer, the Kaddish or prayer for the dead, the morning prayers and Sabbath hymns, catch Ilana's ear while she is sitting on the beach building sand castles or reading on the porch with her mother. Soon, the exoticism of the yarmulkas, the Sabbath rituals and the dietary restrictions, attract Ilana and draw her near so that when she returns to Brooklyn in the fall she begins to secretly attend synagogue with the Dinns. Her father's trip to Spain to cover...