http://www.inlander.com/spokane/articles.sec-52-1-book-review.html certain air of romance surrounds early American adventurers. Call it manifest destiny or whatever you will, but these rugged individualists of the 1800s embodied the can-do-spirit of the Americas — where everyone was a pioneer, master of his own fortune and outlandishly in love with the heartland.]]> There was a time when America was just a lad, wanting so badly to grow up strong and wise. As a foster-parent and role model, who better than mother France, the ancient nation that midwived us to life during the American Revolution?.]]> From the anonymous manifesto denouncing the pharmaceutical industry, on the first page, to a bronze sculpture of a suppressed anti-Nazi newspaper headline weighted down by a giant hammer and nails, on the last, David Lester’s graphic novel The Listener.]]> “I had a kind of midlife crisis at 20,” David Foster Wallace told San Diego State professor Larry Mc- Caffery In 1991, “which probably doesn’t argue real well for my longevity.]]> Bed bugs are tiny — and in the first stages of life, almost impossible to see. As adults, they’re about the size of apple seeds. A female bug will lay up to 500 eggs in her lifetime. Bed bugs can squeeze through a crack the width of a business card, but are perfectly happy to walk over the threshold of your front door.]]> As it turns out, there’s a good excuse for your lapses. Psychologists say there’s a “curve of forgetting” that starts the second you learn something, and if there are more than seven components, the problem worsens. (Phone numbers are seven digits long for a reason.]]> Supporters of the so-called megaloads have trumpeted that Highway 12’s main purpose is to serve commerce. And indeed, it was persistent lobbying for a commercial route through the mountains that swayed the federal government to build the road in the 1940s.]]> The landlord gives permission to scavenge through her things. You decide to take a box filled with letters and coins, knickknacks and photographs. You look through the box, get curious, make up stories.]]> Then he scribbles some notes. And that’s his job. As booze writer for Playboy.com — an occupation which ranks just below “bikini model oiler” in its ability to elicit high-fives from awesome bros — he suffers the blearyeyed nights and into-the-next-evening hangovers so we don’t have to.]]> Most textbooks sag with the weaknesses of academic writing, shunning flavor and seeming to fear that any kind of flair will undermine the seriousness of their subjects..]]> The Lover’s Dictionary.]]> And when that time comes, we’ll probably talk about how much we love him and how we can’t believe his name is not as well known as those of Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Wolfe, who once described Portis as “the original laconic cutup” from their days together at the New York Herald- Tribune.]]> When you’re an Army wife living on a base like Fort Hood in Texas, you learn to get along with others, even though you might never see them again after this deployment. You’ll be moving in six months or a year or two — but that doesn’t mean you won’t baby-sit in a pinch.]]> She was trying to set up a meeting between King and Calvin Craig of the Ku Klux Klan. As King’s director of public relations, Clayton was used to hoaxes — so when a waitress handed her a note that said Dr. King had been shot, she ignored it. Soon, realizing the horror, she hurried to Coretta King’s side.]]> Sometimes historical fiction shows that the history’s been based on a fiction. In 2005, scholars uncovered evidence that the famous Tiffany leaded-glass lamps of a century ago may not have been designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany at all.]]> In the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th, child abandonment was common, and orphans were sometimes treated like dogs; in fact, Humane Societies originally tended to both.]]> On Dec. 8, 1980, Barbara Streisand, Kenny Rogers, and Stevie Wonder topped the Billboard LP charts. Four American nuns were murdered in El Salvador a few days prior. Ronald Reagan was preparing for his presidency, having just been elected a month before.]]> (Actually, kinda. Hardtack, we’re told, is an “extremely thick cracker, made from flour, water, and occasionally salt … favored by seafarers.” And sleeve garters are those armbands you see bartenders wearing in Old West movies, to help them keep their sleeves up in the days when all sleeves were made extra-long, one size fits all.]]> But his subjects remain passive, uninteresting, unlikable. Jonas Woldemariam sets out to trace a road trip taken by his parents Yosef and Mariam, both Ethiopian immigrants, through the American Midwest and South.]]>