Word: speare
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...biologists, local tribesmen and scary big-game hunters, Caputo heads into the African scrub to find the lions. This is darkest Hemingway country--the ghost of Francis Macomber haunts every page--but Caputo is blessedly free of Papa's ego. He's not afraid to describe an unsuccessful spear-throwing lesson with a Masai warrior or the distinctly un-Hemingwayesque experience of passing out from taking too much malaria medicine. He also tells us a few things Papa never did--like how, exactly, a lion eats a human being (belly first, then buttocks and thighs...
Talk about divine inspiration. Twenty-eight army recruits stood at attention at a swearing-in ceremony on May 6, each holding his weapon - a combination of spear and battle ax called a halberd - and listening intently to the boss' pep talk. "I hope that despite the heaviness of your service you will live this time of mission as a deepening of your faith," he said. Of course, not many armies can boast that their commander is Pope John Paul II, the peace-loving head of the Roman Catholic Church. And in an era of drab, utilitarian uniforms, few recruits start...
...been 12 years since her last novel, but in The Shelters of Stone (Crown; 753 pages) little has changed. Auel's heroine, the plucky orphan Ayla, is still making her way in the spear-throwing, wolf-taming, sexually liberated Cro-Magnon era. Shelters is Auel's Paleolithic answer to Meet the Parents: Ayla's studly paramour Jondalar takes her home to his tribe, which lives on the site of the famous Lascaux cave paintings. Tension ensues--they had bitchy ex-girlfriends back then too--along with the occasional steamy sex scene and a short course in such lost arts...
...Franks' spear is lodged in Paktia province, where lots of sand and snow as well as rain storms and fog are making air support impossible. There are also plenty of what Franks calls "bad guys" who have nothing left to lose. Eight U.S. soldiers have been killed this past week in vicious firefights, some 70 others wounded; America has been reminded that war, besides being hell, is war, and when you put boots on the ground some of them are not going to walk away...
...Greek phalanx - columns of spear-carriers drawn largely from free property owners with a substantial stake in a battle's outcome - established infantrymen as the centerpiece of European military power. At the Battle of Poitiers (A.D. 732) Frankish infantry, the phalanx's latest adaptation, routed much-feared Muslim cavalrymen. The Franks' victory confirmed, says Hanson, "that good heavy infantry, if it maintained rank and found a defensible position, usually defeated good cavalry...