Word: prankishness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Runciman's History of the Crusades, now brought to authoritative completion with the third volume, The Kingdom of Acre. Historian Runciman writes in the magistral tradition of Gibbon, Macaulay and his mentor, G. M. Trevelyan. The first two volumes (TIME, Dec. i, 1952) told how the half-civilized Prankish warriors, massacring Saracens on the walls of Jerusalem and Tyre, won dazzling triumphs and founded a kingdom in the Holy Land. The concluding volume relates the somber story of how the warrior pilgrims, having lost the Holy City while squabbling over lands and trade, also lost their crusading fervor...
...crusading tide ebbed, the Saracens picked off one beleaguered Christian fortress after another-Antioch, Tripoli, and finally, in 1291, Tyre and Acre. That was the end of the Prankish kingdom in the East, though the West went on talking for centuries of liberating Jerusalem (Vasco da Gama and Columbus both piously hoped to take it from the rear...
...Toynbee glides over the millenniums, from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy to the U.S. Civil War to Carthage's "wooden curtain" of ships to Persian headgear to the Nestorian Uighur Turkish secretaries of the Mongols to the Tokugawa regime in Japan to the Argonauts to Kon-Tiki to the Prankish Lex Salica to U.S. television, gives the reader a heady sense of omniscience and omnipresence. Toynbee is at his most fascinating and most expert as a technician of civilization. When he ex plains a civilization's functioning, he evokes the kind of satisfaction that goes with learning the workings...
...credit for two pioneering firsts that changed the course of elephant training: 1) Bandoola was the first Burmese work elephant reared from birth in captivity; 2) he was trained with kindness. Previous trainers captured grown elephants and tamed them to their tasks by breaking their spirits. Once past his prankish teens, Bandoola began racking up work records that made him famed in the Burma of the '20s, '30s and '40s. In one season, he extracted 300 tons of teak and pushed and dragged it an average distance of two miles from stump to floating stream...
Flight for Life. Nor was that all. When he flew on to Miami to broadcast from his favorite Kenilworth Hotel. Godfrey scented another conspiracy: some prankish...