Word: readerly
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...Spaniards discovered a veritable mountain of silver at Potosí, but it was only thanks to the potato - domesticated in Peru's uplands some 8,000 years earlier - that Spanish slave drivers could feed the army of conscripted miners they deployed to dig up the silver. As John Reader recounts in Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World History, the flood of bullion proved more than the Old World could absorb. The unintended result: inflation that shredded Europe's social fabric, disrupted its monetary system and debased the precious metal itself. Blame it on the potato...
...last up to two and a half years. At one store in Philadelphia women could purchase black fabrics of every design in July 1863—which was, Faust devilishly adds, “just in time for Gettysburg.” It takes great talent to make a reader laugh while writing about the Civil War. No one, even the fashionable lady mourner, is exempt from Faust’s wit. Everyone’s story—whether they’re a private or a general, a slave or a Harvard scholar—is fair game...
...websites that have published news of the abuse display a notable lack of concern. "The insults to Mr. Hamilton aren't racist because they aren't insulting him for being black, they insult him for being a Formula One driver [who is] giving it to Alonso," writes one Marca reader...
...scenes of privation, corruption, rights abuse and social stratification, Chettri's depiction is one that holds enduring relevance for many Nepalis. They are, of course, his intended readership, but that means that the local color Chettri paints with can sometimes be disorienting, if not frustratingly inaccessible, for a foreign reader. Certain domestic images are familiarly rustic - there are granaries and millstones, and whitewashed homes with butter churns, milk pails, earthen hearths and chaff-filled pillows. But other features, particularly indigenous flora, are harder to visualize, even with translator Michael J. Hutt's detailed endnotes. Bhorla, angeri leaves, chilaune trees - without...
...should it shock that, in the patriarchal world Chettri describes, Jhuma blames herself. "Her heart was heavy, and it burned with remorse," writes Chettri. Soon after she discovers that she's pregnant and that the soldier has fled, Jhuma prepares to kill herself. What might jolt a contemporary reader, though, is her feudal salvation: just as she's about to jump off a cliff, Jhuma is saved by a fat old goatherd who has secretly loved her and promises to care for her forever. She relents, with many "tears...