Word: preservationist
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...Westerner might understand it. The lieutenant general, educated in part in the U.S., is respectful of its national spirit (and industrial might) and believes that a live soldier, capable of carrying on the fight, is infinitely more valuable than a dead one enjoying an honorable afterlife. Thanks to his preservationist tactics, a battle that was supposed to last five days consumed almost 40, though honor demanded his suicide in the end. Saigo, who, as Eastwood says, "wants what most human beings want" (a peaceful life with friends and family), meets an unexpected fate...
Short answer: the good stuff. In The Preservationist (St. Martin's; 230 pages), first-time novelist David Maine picks on Noah again, and with good reason. The story of Noah, crowded with incident though it is, gets just four brief chapters in Genesis, and Maine has a terrific time romping around in the gaps between the verses, mouthing off in the somber silences between those Old Testament phrases. How does it feel to be 600 years old, as Noe (Maine uses archaic spellings for biblical names) was at the time of the flood? The Bible offhandedly mentions giants--what were...
...turns out, much of the fun of The Preservationist lies with Noe's daughters-in-law, who furnish him with a chatty, catty shipboard peanut gallery. His eldest son Sem (usually spelled Shem) is married to unflappable, pragmatic Bera, who gets stuck with a lot of the animal-gathering chores. "The problem with people who think that God will provide," she remarks tartly, "is that they think God will provide." Cham (Ham)--the most skeptical of the sons and the most sympathetic--is paired with mysterious, icy Ilya, a refugee from a northern land who subjects Noe's religious zeal...
...sitcom father to that feuding brood. Maine treats him irreverently, but if he knocks the patriarch down a peg, it's only so that we can re-encounter the hoary Old Testament icon afresh as a sensual, fallible human being and really appreciate his greatness and his sacrifice. The Preservationist reminds us that being God's servant 24/7 is both the ultimate privilege and a hell of a lot of hard work, and Noe is the hardest-working man in the Bible...
...British and his mother American). He studied government at the College and, after his undergraduate years, he became an officer at a New York bank and worked both in New York and in Washington, D.C. In 1959, he resigned from the banking world and took up the role of preservationist at the Biltmore Estate in North Caorlina, his familys home. His challenge was to preserve the 250-room Biltmore House and the surrounding lands for future generations. In 1963, the Department of the Interior declared Biltmore a National Landmark...