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69ae54a
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In part, he knew, this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison, and here Dodd found deepest irony. "At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting." He added, "One might easily wish he we..
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Erik Larson |
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ec6c4d3
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The bells on the streetcars ring, buses clatter by honking their horns, stuffed full with people and more people; taxis and fancy private automobiles hum over the glassy asphalt," he wrote. "The fragrance of heavy perfume floats by. Harlots smile from the artful pastels of fashionable women's faces; so-called men stroll to and fro, monocles glinting; fake and precious stones sparkle." Berlin was, he wrote, a "stone desert" filled with sin a..
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Erik Larson |
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d129af3
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One can evade a danger that one recognizes,' wrote historian Friedrich Zipfel, 'but a police working in the dark becomes uncanny. Nowhere does one feel safe from it. While not omnipresent, it could appear, search arrest. The worried citizen no longer knows whom he ought to trust.
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Erik Larson |
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ffcbecd
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He saw Hitler's stature within Germany grow to that of a god. Women cried as he passed near; souvenir hunters dug up parcels of earth from the ground on which he stepped. At the September 1936 party rally in Nuremberg, which Dodd did not attend, Hitler launched his audience into near hysteria. "That you have found me ... among so many millions is the miracle of our time!" he cried. "And that I have found you, that is Germany's fortune!"
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Erik Larson |
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f795112
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Wilson was outraged but chose not to see the declaration itself as sufficient justification for war. What he did not yet know was that there was a second, very secret message appended to the telegram Bernstorff had received and that both telegrams had been intercepted and relayed to Blinker Hall's intelligence division in the Old Admiralty Building in London, which by now oversaw a second, and singularly sensitive, component of Room 40's op..
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Erik Larson |
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d05f291
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After experiencing life in Nazi Germany, Thomas Wolfe wrote, "Here was an entire nation ... infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations."
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Erik Larson |
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66e0bbd
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A common story had begun to circulate: One man telephones another and in the course of their conversation happens to ask, "How is Uncle Adolf?" Soon afterward the secret police appear at his door and insist that he prove that he really does have an Uncle Adolf and that the question was not in fact a coded reference to Hitler. Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surger..
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Erik Larson |
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827ae31
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There began to appear before my romantic eyes...a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.
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war
history
hitler
world-war-ii
germany
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Erik Larson |
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14e8d50
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General Electric rather miraculously came back with a bid of $554,000. But Westinghouse, whose AC system was inherently cheaper and more efficient, bid $399,000. The exposition went with Westinghouse, and helped change the history of electricity.
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Erik Larson |
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58db325
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Chicago shrugged the sniping off. Big was big. Success today would dispel at last the eastern perception that Chicago was nothing more than a greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater; failure would bring humiliation from which the city would not soon recover, given how heartily its leading men had boasted that Chicago would prevail. It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson D..
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Erik Larson |
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08551c5
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MARTHA'S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had.
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Erik Larson |
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7fb6de0
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THE DATE WAS APRIL 14, 1912, a sinister day in maritime history, but of course the man in suite 63-65, shelter deck C, did not yet know it.
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Erik Larson |
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addd972
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There are no heroes here, at least not of the Schindler's List variety, but there are glimmers of heroism and people who behave with unexpected grace.
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Erik Larson |
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9700526
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As before, Dodd believed Hitler was "perfectly sincere" about wanting peace. Now, however, the ambassador had realized, as had Messersmith before him, that Hitler's real purpose was to buy time to allow Germany to rearm. Hitler wanted peace only to prepare for war. "In the back of his mind," Dodd wrote, "is the old German idea of dominating Europe through warfare."
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Erik Larson |
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1f14770
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Strange things began to happen that made Holmes's claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Holmes's last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire..
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Erik Larson |
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5631f38
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Once again no one in the U.S. government had made any public statement either supporting the trial or criticizing the Hitler regime. The question remained: what was everyone afraid of?
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Erik Larson |
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87354cf
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Holmes was testing his power to bend the lives of people.
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Erik Larson |
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12cce80
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They found a city steaming with heat--91 degrees on Tuesday, April 27, with four days yet to go until "Straw Hat Day," Saturday, May 1, when a man could at last break out his summer hats. Men followed this rule. A Times reporter did an impromptu visual survey of Broadway and spotted only two straw hats. "Thousands of sweltering, uncomfortable men plodded along with their winter headgear at all angles on their uncomfortable heads or carried ..
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Erik Larson |
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f7e91c2
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America, secure in its fortress of neutrality, watched the war at a remove and found it all unfathomable. Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. "It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War," he wrote. "We have come to read almost with indifference of vast..
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Erik Larson |
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0a6d3f6
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I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future," he wrote. "In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years."
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Erik Larson |
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d88c58b
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There were always those passengers who came aboard bearing grudges against the modern age.
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perspective
technology
nostalgia
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Erik Larson |
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f0102f5
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a new beer did well, winning the exposition's top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon.
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Erik Larson |
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0726b48
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NOW FIVE DAYS into its voyage, the Lusitania made its way toward Britain alone, with no escort offered or planned, and no instruction to take the newly opened and safer North Channel route--this despite the fact that the ship carried a valuable cache of rifle cartridges and desperately needed shrapnel shells.
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Erik Larson |
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5ef8060
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In conclusion," he said, "one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse." To fail to learn from such "blunders of the past," he said, was to end up on a course toward "another war and chaos."
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Erik Larson |
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315a478
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A Bridgeport, Connecticut, man presented his girlfriend with an engagement ring and handed her one end of a ribbon; the other end disappeared into his pocket. "A surprise," he said, and urged her to pull it. She obliged. The ribbon was attached to the trigger of a revolver. The man died instantly. And" --
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Erik Larson |
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73e0361
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My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and to various points east, including the always amazing Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives, and equally enticing archives in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge.
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Erik Larson |
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7f435aa
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If you cannot give me all that I want--what my heart finds it hard now to breathe without--it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you could give it if I were--and if you understood,--understood the boy's heart that is in me and the simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days would be radiant.
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Erik Larson |
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536b660
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The thing that weighed on him most, however, was the irrationality of the world in which he now found himself. To some extent he was a prisoner of his own training. As a historian, he had come to view the world as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people, and he expected the men around him to behave in a civil and coherent manner. But Hitler's government was neither civil nor coherent, and the natio..
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Erik Larson |
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8f16914
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Franke writes, "We do know that Holmes advertised his 'hotel' as a suitable lodging for visitors to the world's fair; that no fewer than fifty persons, reported to the police as missing, were traced to the Castle; and that there their trail ended" (109). Schechter: "No one can say exactly how many fairgoers Holmes lured to the Castle between May and October 1893, though he appears to have filled the place to capacity on most nights"
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Erik Larson |
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d5fe490
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In the time of the fair the rate at which men and women killed one another rose sharply throughout the nation but especially in Chicago, where police found themselves without the manpower or expertise to manage the volume. In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day. Most were prosaic, arising from robbery, argument, or sexual jealousy. Men shot women, women shot men, and children sho..
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Erik Larson |
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6a01cb0
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Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty's past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40's intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania's path; given Cunard chair..
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Erik Larson |
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b4315b4
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British currency was configured in pounds, shillings, and pence. One pound equaled twenty shillings, written as 20 s., which in turn equaled 240 pence, or 240 d. A new pound is equal to 100 pennies, with one penny equal to 2.4 of the obsolete pence.)
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Erik Larson |
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e9b72a5
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I relied on an unpublished report by Jose Fernandez-Partagas, a late-twentieth-century meteorologist who recreated for the National Hurricane Center the tracks of many historical hurricanes, among them the Galveston Hurricane. He was a meticulous researcher given to long hours in the library of the University of Miami, where he died on August 25, 1997, in his favorite couch. He had no money, no family, no friends--only hurricanes. The hurri..
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galveston
non-fiction
hurricane
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Erik Larson |
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7b87341
|
Marconi recognized that with no revenue and no contracts and in the face of persistent skepticism, he needed more than ever to capture an ally of prominence and credibility. Through Fleming, however, Marconi also hoped to gain a benefit more tangible. His new idea, the feat he hoped would command the world's attention once and for all, would require more power and involve greater danger, physical and fiscal, than anything he had attempted b..
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Erik Larson |
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dbddd68
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Nonetheless the man (Hitler) had a remarkable ability to transform himself into something far more compelling, especially when speaking in public or during private meetings when some topic enraged him. He had a knack as well for projecting an aura of sincerity that blinded onlookers to his true motives and beliefs..
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nazi
ww2
hitler
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Erik Larson |
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791be23
|
The most terrifying part of battle was the exit from a trench--standing up and climbing out, knowing that the opposing force would at that moment unleash a fusillade that would continue until the offensive concluded, either with victory, meaning a few yards gained, or defeat, a few yards lost, but invariably with half one's battalion dead, wounded, or missing. "I shall never forget the moment when we had to leave the shelter of the trenches..
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Erik Larson |
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e9653ba
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Starting in 1897, Henry Havelock Ellis devoted six volumes to it: his pioneering Studies in the Psychology of Sex, sprinkled with case studies of unexpected explicitness and perversity. One memorable phrase from volume four, Sexual Selection in Man: "the contact of a dog's tongue with her mouth alone afterward sufficed to evoke sexual pleasure."
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Erik Larson |
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1e1c8d1
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As a homeopath, he knew the powers not just of ordinary opiates but also of poisons such as aconite, from the root of the plant monkshood; atropine, from belladonna (or deadly nightshade); and rhus toxin from poison ivy. In large doses each could prove fatal, but when administered in tiny amounts, typically in combination with other agents, such compounds could produce a useful palette of physical reactions that mimicked the symptoms of kno..
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Erik Larson |
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371c1a1
|
If there were a Pulitzer for bleak irony, however, it would go to the News for its Saturday-morning report on one of the most important local stories of the year--the Galveston count of the 1900 U.S. census, which the newspaper had first announced on Friday. The news was excellent: Over the last decade of the nineteenth century, the city's population had increased by 29.93 percent, the highest growth rate of any southern city counted so far..
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Erik Larson |
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bf84061
|
Another inventor, J. B. McComber, representing the Chicago-Tower Spiral-Spring Ascension and Toboggan Transportation Company, proposed a tower with a height of 8,947 feet, nearly nine times the height of the Eiffel Tower, with a base one thousand feet in diameter sunk two thousand feet into the earth. Elevated rails would lead from the top of the tower all the way to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. Visitors ready to conclude ..
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Erik Larson |
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613375e
|
we are always personally under an agitating pressure and cloud of anxiety." And Olmsted himself had grown increasingly susceptible to illness. He was sixty-eight years old and partly lame from a decades-old carriage accident that had left one leg an inch shorter than the other. He was prone to lengthy bouts of depression. His teeth hurt. He had chronic insomnia and facial neuralgia. A mysterious roaring in his ears at times made it difficul..
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Erik Larson |
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1771827
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During her time at Miss Porter's School in Farmington she had often become depressed and was hobbled by fatigue. In 1887, when she was twenty, she wrote in her diary, "Tears come without any provocation. Headache all day." The school's headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, offered therapeutic counsel. "Cheer up," she told Theodate. "Always be happy." It did not work. The next year, in March 1888, her parents sent her to Philadelphia, to b..
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Erik Larson |
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068acda
|
a butterfly in a West African rain forest, by flitting to the left of a tree rather than to the right, possibly set into motion a chain of events that escalates into a hurricane striking coastal South Carolina a few weeks later?
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Erik Larson |
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1793ce5
|
If you had to jump six or seven feet or certainly drown, it's surprising how far even older people will jump.
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resolution
priorities
perspective
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Erik Larson |