Word: snow
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...conferences. Guterson, known for his flannel shirts and the home schooling of his four children, was until recently a high school teacher who cited as his inspiration the schoolroom classic To Kill a Mockingbird. But in the midst of this unpresuming existence, his meticulously researched yet crackling debut novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), became one of the fastest-selling literary novels of the decade, moving more than 2.5 million copies in paperback even as it won critical prizes. (The movie version will be released this fall...
...miraculous debut and the succeeding five years of expectations. "I'm scared enough when I sit down to write," he says disarmingly, "that there isn't a lot of extra fright that goes with having a best-selling novel behind me." Besides, East of the Mountains was started before Snow Falling on Cedars had fallen onto nearly every bedside table. Yet the fact remains that bookstores are filled with 500,000 hardbound copies of a novel whose main virtue is its uneventful drift...
...through the autumn landscape--"the prairie smelled of sage and of the dampness held in the earth"--he goes back in memory to his boyhood days of picking apples, his teenage courtship of Rachel, his service in Italy during World War II. Though the narrative is as vagrant as Snow Falling on Cedars was rooted, Guterson's gift for spinning atmospheric spells has not deserted him, and moment after moment flashes into life with the quick vividness of a photograph: the men in war going out "in mattress covers sewn into snow tunics and in creepers made of tightly knotted...
...quiet, but nature is moving all around us." The kids reflect on her words for two seconds before pushing one another over in yelping heaps of skis and poles. Kearns, an elfin woman with twinkly eyes, smiles at the antics and pushes ahead into the thickening snow blurring the Adirondack wilderness ahead. She's leading her students on an overnight field trip to discover the beauty and history of this mountain range in upstate New York. Kearns is convinced that getting out into nature, "fondling nature," she calls it, will someday enable these kids to be better people...
Since early April, the Kosovo Liberation Army has been locked in its biggest, most important battle: an attempt by many of its most elite, experienced soldiers to open a corridor into Kosovo through the snow-swept mountains of northern Albania. Last week hundreds of fighters attacked and captured a small, six-hut Serbian border post at Kosare and swept through a nearby Serbian army barracks. The goal, commanders said, was to reach as many as 20,000 refugees stranded near the border and create a bridgehead that would allow the rebel army to set up bases inside Kosovo...