Word: gaffney
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...other prominent conservatives to promote energy independence as a hard, dry national-security issue rather than as soft, wet environmentalism. These conservatives support a major federal push to promote alternative fuels--ethanol, biodiesel, liquefied natural gas--and hybrid-auto technologies. "This is not pie in the sky," says Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, as tough-minded a security hawk as can be found in Washington. "The technology is all there. But you need tax incentives to encourage the automobile companies to produce the hybrid cars and federal support to bring the alternative fuels to the pump...
...There is some enthusiasm within the White House for an alternative-energy push, although it doesn't quite match Gaffney's best-case euphoria. Karl Rove has educated himself on issues as arcane as the vagaries of ethanol transport, and there is a drizzle of funds for research into alternative fuels in Bush's big fat energy bill. But the President and Dick Cheney, who has been in charge of energy policy, remain oilmen at heart, skeptical about a major Manhattan Project-style national campaign to redirect the energy market, mindful of the time and expense necessary to build...
...have sex, drive around, and boy do they talk, talk, talk, but when it comes to putting in an honest day's hard labor, suddenly, whoops! It's time for a scene change, or a flashback, or a few pages of deep internal monologue. That's what makes Elizabeth Gaffney's Metropolis (Random House; 461 pages) and Thomas Kelly's Empire Rising (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 390 pages) so unusual. They don't push work into the margins: Their characters actually get stuff done...
...even though there's plenty of sex and violence and violent sex in Metropolis, the most compelling parts are actually Gaffney's accounts of 19th century manual labor, which are as coolly, finely drawn as an architect's rendering. Her German leading man shovels snow and lays roads for the city, replacing New York City's "knobby, pothole-begetting ostrich-egg cobblestones" with slabs of smooth Belgian granite. He does time mucking out the fascinating labyrinth of Manhattan sewers. He works underwater laying the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge in the silty muck at the bottom of the East River...
Dickens was the first novelist who really nailed life in the modern city, and Gaffney's Manhattan, with its horse carts and street urchins, is still recognizably Dickensian. But the New York of Thomas Kelly's Empire Rising, set in 1930, is very much a 20th century beast: caffeinated, electrified, car and money and baseball crazy, with subways rumbling in its bowels and skyscrapers sprouting from its scalp. Kelly's hero, a good-natured Irishman named Michael Briody, is busy riveting together the skeleton of the Empire State Building, which at the peak of construction grew by a floor...