Word: servants
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...fiction works (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 265 pages), James Wood tells a story from Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March, a novel that since its publication in 1932 has probably been read by only two people, namely James Wood and Joseph Roth. A military officer visits his servant, who is on his deathbed. When the officer enters, the old servant tries to click his heels together, even though he is under the covers and his feet are bare. It's a moment of deep, lancing pathos, when you seem to take in both characters' entire lives for an instant...
...great pleasure of Wood's book lies in the examples, not the points they prove, and the lessons lie in watching him read, not think. The novel exists only in practice, not in theory, in the moment when the brain hits the page--the moment when a dying servant's bare heels meet beneath the sheets on his deathbed...
...miles (640 km) between Herat and Kabul. The villages along the route were led by tribal chiefs, mullahs or guerrilla commanders who had little to do with their neighbors, let alone with the central government. Most districts that I visited had no schools or clinics. As a civil servant - I was on leave from my job in Britain's Foreign Office - I was surprised by how poor Afghanistan was and how ungoverned...
...aware of the possibility that the oppressed might eke out moments of joy amid their sorrows. This was the subject matter of a sprightly little tale titled A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It, published in the 1870s. The narrator asks his 60-ish black servant, Aunt Rachel--who spent most of her life as a slave--why she is so happy all the time. The story is her answer, and I will not spoil it other than to suggest that Twain manages, in just a few pages, to lead us through the complexities of seeking...
...Face-stuffing has been around for centuries, of course: the Edda, a collection of 13th-century Norse myths, tells of an eating contest between the god Loki and his servant (the servant won by eating the plate). But organized competitive eating - consuming as much as you can, as fast as you can, within a given period of time - is relatively new. According to Major League Eating, the sport's governing body (yes, there is one) the American version of the pastime began in 1916, the year that Nathan's Famous held its first Fourth of July hot dog-eating contest...