Word: somersets
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...finally been collected into a 350-page manuscript. What started as a digest of her own genealogy ended up being nothing less than a family tree of all the descendants of the slaves -- bearing 21 different surnames -- who once worked on one of North Carolina's grand plantations, Somerset, just out of Creswell on Phelps Lake...
...subtitle, America's Magic Mountain, refers to Thomas Mann's novel of a sanatorium as microcosm. Fair enough; this lively history reflects a galaxy of medical and literary incidents. The cast is worth the entrance fee: W. Somerset Maugham and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walker Percy and Bela Bartok, and even Gerald and Sara Murphy, the '20s couple who decided that living well was the best revenge. They all had one thing in common: tuberculosis, and the refuge in upstate New York offered the promise of recovery. Sometimes it was illusory. Bartok flourished at Saranac but later succumbed to the disease...
Cuomo's mind is swift and shrewd, almost awesome in its ability to grasp and retain material. He takes a lot from his voracious reading. "This morning," he wrote recently in his diary, "I read an hour or so of The Razor's Edge (Somerset Maugham's novel about a restless man searching for inner understanding). It always had good meanings for me." Another morning he rereads portions of Thomas Jefferson's autobiography. "One thing struck me," wrote Cuomo, "the logical forcefulness of his debate...
...about himself after the death of the detective's creator. Still, most of those who find themselves appearing under other names have a tendency to seethe. The reason for their umbrage frequently has less to do with egos than with wallets. The model for the romantic doctor in W. Somerset Maugham's story The Happy Man was typical. The author had profited handsomely from his tale, complained the original, but where was the fee for the man who had lived it? A Swazi warrior named M'hlopekazi was more succinct. He was the inspiration for Umslopogaas, the intrepid tribesman...
...cold-hearted villain, complete with gaunt complexion, beady eyes and extended five o'clock shadow. The first of the principal actors to appear on-screen, we see him directly after the camera shows the ax being lowered over the head of King Edward's former favorite, the Duke of Somerset. After hearing of Somerset's death, Northumberland nestles back into his chair and with an admirable coolness, casually inquires, "Did he die well...