Word: sanding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GEORGE SAND: A BIOGRAPHY by CURTIS GATE 812 pages. Houghton Mifflin...
...that could boast more than its share of eccentric geniuses, George Sand remained almost unchallenged in her reputation as the most provocative woman of her time. In the 19th century, as now, her public image was that of a cigar-smoking iconoclast in top hat and trousers, an unabashed libertine of dubious sexual inclinations. She was also the writer whom Dostoyevsky dubbed "the Christian par excellence" and whom Elizabeth Barrett Browning hailed as "the first female genius of any country...
Trying to disentangle the woman, who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804, from the legendary creature known as George Sand could easily have proved a biographer's undoing. But Curtis Gate, whose previous work includes a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, approaches the task with both the patience of a scholar and the relish of a storyteller. He manages to puncture the myth without deflating the life. From the moment she arrived in Paris in 1831, a 26-year-old berrichonne provincial fleeing from her small-spirited husband, rumor began placing her in bed with almost...
Tales of George Sand's amours with Liszt, Heine, Balzac and Flaubert are also dismissed as apocryphal. With the record thus cleared, Biographer Cate dramatically details the involvements that his scholarship can verify-including affairs with Prosper Mérimeée, Alfred de Musset, Frédéric Chopin, one Italian surgeon, two French lawyers and an international assortment of young men who entered Sand's household as tutors for her two children, Maurice and Solange...
...Israel would give up the Mitla Pass and almost all of the Giddi Pass, retaining only some foothills at its eastern terminus (see map following page). The passes are the keys to the Sinai. North of them is soft sand; south of them are towering granite mountains. Any army that wants to move across the peninsula is almost compelled to go through the two passes, and Israel's General Staff has hitherto considered them indispensable to the country's security. Since the October war in 1973, Jerusalem has spent $60 million fortifying nature's own impressive defenses...