If I were Donald Rumsfeld’s son, I’d give him “Horse Soldiers” for Father’s Day. During his tenure as George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Rumsfeld championed a mode of warfare that relied on limited numbers of soldiers armed with high-tech equipment ...
Charles Darwin was nothing if not methodical. In the summer of 1838, two years after his round-the-world journey on the Beagle, the 29-year-old naturalist drew a line down the center of a sheet of paper. Topping one column, he wrote “Marry.” On the ...
Elsewhere, U.S.A. How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety, By Dalton Conley. 221 pages. Pantheon. $24. At the end of "Elsewhere, U.S.A.," his talk show-ready ...
In the literature of the American frontier, few setups are as fertile and reliable as the Easterner come West. The stranger arrives in a strange land looking for rebirth, a second chance, a place to call his own. Owen Wister pioneered the form in “The ...
My father-in-law is a ski history nut. He can name nearly every World Cup downhill champion of the past 30 years. On his living room bookshelf you will find copies of Ski Racing magazine stretching back to the early 1980s. The man is going to love "Two ...
My father-in-law is a ski-history nut. He can name nearly every World Cup downhill champion of the past 30 years. On his living room bookshelf you will find copies of Ski Racing magazine stretching back to the early 1980s. The man is going to love “Two ...
A few months ago, Nepal, under pressure from China, closed the popular South Col route on Mount Everest for 10 days so Chinese mountaineers could carry the Olympic torch to the summit unhindered by human traffic. Foreign climbers were outraged. One ...
Fallen Giants A History of Himalayan Mountaineering From the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes. By Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver. Illustrated. 579 pages. $39.95. Yale University Press. A few months ago, Nepal, under pressure from China, ...
Chilean Patagonia is renowned for its rugged beauty: windswept Andean peaks, roaring rivers, pristine coastal rainforests. Years ago, those natural wonders inspired architect Peter Hartmann to abandon his native Santiago for Coyhaique, a small regional ...
In college, I had a friend named Kurt. A lot of people know someone like Kurt in college brilliant, obsessive and kind of scary. He stayed up 72 hours reading Goethe. He filled a 50-page notebook with tiny scrawled notes about Henry James. (These weren’ ...
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