Word: pumpkins
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John McPhee has written whole, albeit slim books on oranges, the New Jersey pine barrens, Scottish weavers, an exotic flying machine called the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, and the proliferation of that ultimate Saturday-night special, the cheap nuclear device. McPhee's The Levels of the Game is still the best book on tennis, in the same meticulous and quietly passionate way that makes A.J. Leibling's The Sweet Science the best book on boxing...
...pots of cabbage with raisins and cream of tartar. They had baked strudels, tarts, all kinds of fruitcakes. The burial society gave a banquet and mead was poured like water. One of the elders who had special merit in the eyes of the community was honored by having a pumpkin with lighted candles placed on his head, and being carried on the shoulders of the people to the synagogue yard. Bevies of children, the holy sheep ran after him baaing...
...green, which costs one franc a kilo, and which one eats." This generosity about the physical world pervades even a nominally "sinister" Helion like Exorcism, 1973 (see color page): the chair draped with clothes, its legs stuck into shoes, suggests some kind of rural witchcraft, but the sliced pumpkin is as replete with life as a Rubens backside...
...Word of Chambers' sensational new revelations quickly reached the House Un-American Activities Committee, before which he had originally accused Hiss. When Committee Member Richard M. Nixon issued a subpoena for any further evidence, Chambers led agents to his Maryland farm and pointed to a hollowed-out pumpkin. Fearful of prowling Hiss investigators, he said, he had put the films in the pumpkin while he was gone for the day. Thus were baptized the famous "pumpkin papers...
...Witness, Chambers explained that he was influenced in his choice of hiding place by the memory of a Soviet film featuring pumpkin-like papier-mâché figures in which revolutionaries hid weapons. Lionel Trilling, however, in a new introduction to his Chambers-era roman à clef, The Middle of the Journey, suggests a more bizarre psychological reason: shortly after Chambers quit the Communist Party and emerged from the underground, friends who feared for his life asked him to a Halloween party to establish his public identity and so forestall murder. The memory of this experience may have...