Word: swamped
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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HARRY CREWS' father worked for seven years in the 1920s building a road through the Everglades; the first part of A Childhood concerns itself with a son imagining what his father, whom he never knew, might have thought about an Indian woman his father had known in the swamps: "He had not wanted her, but they had been in the swamp for three years. They worked around the clock, and if they weren't working or sleeping, their time was pretty much spent drinking or fighting or shooting gators. So since he could not have what he wanted, he tried...
...face?inches away, if that. Bob's brain was blown out of his head. It splattered on the NBC minicam. I'll never forget that sight as long as I live. I ran, and then I dived head first into the bush and scrambled as far into the swamp as I could...
...years ago, at the request of the scientists and working entirely from memory, the Haya constructed a traditional furnace. It was 1.6 meters (5 ft.) high, cone-shaped, made of slag and mud and built over a pit packed with partially burned swamp grass; these charred reeds provided the carbon that combined with the molten iron ore to produce steel. Eight ceramic blowpipes, or tuyeèo a goatskin bellows outside. Using these pipes to force preheated air into the furnace, which was fueled by charcoal, the Haya were able to achieve temperatures higher than...
...city of Londonderry has been the symbol of Protestant triumph and Catholic humiliation. For nearly three centuries after the siege, Catholic residents of the city were forbidden by custom to live within Derry's six-foot-thick, lichen-green stone walls; the "Catholic area" was a nearby swamp appropriately called Bogside. Nor were Catholics?even when they became a majority in Derry?ever allowed to play any major role in the city's administration. When, in 1968, Catholic civil rightists did the unthinkable by marching through this Protestant inner sanctum, their defiance touched off a tragic tribal war that...
Still, if the little lives of individual people sputter too briefly for careful notice, clan characteristics do take on recognizable shape. There are the Steeds, wealthy Catholic landowners, tending to be intellectual; the Paxmores, steadfast Quaker shipbuilders: the Caters, solid, intelligent descendants of Cudjo: and the Turlocks, swamp trotters and poachers. Their interlocking fortunes and catastrophes never quite qualify for the terms "gripping" or "absorbing," but they are consistently diverting. Therein lies the author's secret: an attraction that lies not so much in the story as in a serene detachment from the story. The reader gets a four...