Word: rouech
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...subject seems beyond the interest or knowledge of Berton Roueché. An amateur gourmet, he writes lovingly of bananas, "the humblest fruit," but with their comprehensive range of minerals and protective germ-battling skin, a near perfect food. He delves into history to recount the tale of garlic (the early Greeks and Israelites learned about it from the Egyptians). He waxes more poetic about apples, rejecting the notion that this was the fruit forbidden to Adam and Eve. "The apple-the apple I know, the apple of country cider and the autumn roadside bushel-would be out of character...
...Roueché is no less provocative when he turns to more animate objects. Elwood Schmidt maintains a solo medical practice in the lonely little New Mexican town of Jal. With a few carefully chosen quotes, Roueché brings the doctor to life and makes the reader care about him. "Here's a man with nothing wrong with him except he's drunk by noon every day of his life," laments Schmidt to Roueché after his dinner has been interrupted by a would-be patient. "Goddamned people in this town who think I'm like that light...
...other characters described in Roueche's full-length portraits in this collection of 13 pieces that originally appeared in The New Yorker move with a similar ease through the routines of their lives. A Congregational minister visits the aged and tries, without notable success, to counsel the young. Residents of a West Virginia hill town adjust to living in an environment better suited to mountain goats. "How many places do you know," one of the townspeople asks Roueché, "where you can stand at the basement door and spit on the roof of a three-story house?" Visiting...
...they swallowed? Best clue was that Donna had eaten no flounder and had not got sick. Dr. Singley remembered having read in medical school a 1945 report of sodium nitrite poisoning in New York City. A colleague clinched it: he had just reread the same story in Berton Roueché's Eleven Blue Men, reprinted from The New Yorker. Simultaneously, unknown to the Camden team, doctors across the Delaware River were giving methylene blue to women who had eaten flounder in a downtown restaurant...