Word: underground
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...last year, the WPP has transformed itself from a typical underground group into a full-fledged band with a distinctive style...
Saddam has tried it before. During the Gulf War, Iraqi soldiers set fire to 700 of Kuwait's wells using plastic explosives. Dense smoke caused health and environmental problems, as crude gushing from damaged facilities contaminated underground drinking water. Damage amounted to at least $20 billion, and more than a decade later, some of it still isn't repaired...
...Douglass, Rankin--the U.S. produced men like that because slavery, the nation's fatal flaw, was awful enough to breed opponents of equal fury. In Beyond the River (Simon & Schuster; 333 pages), Ann Hagedorn tells Rankin's story as a window onto that era's most audacious utility, the Underground Railroad, the network of safe houses, sympathetic whites and free blacks that helped runaway slaves escape to the North. Rankin, his steadfast wife and reliable sons were among its major links--crucial enough that furious slaveholders put a bounty on the minister's head...
Hagedorn's book could have offered more background on the slave empire and the workings of the Underground Rail-road beyond Ripley, Ohio, Rankin's town. But the ground-level focus gives Hagedorn's story the flavor and fire of an era when even the newspapers had names like the Agitator and the Castigator. And the Rankins turn out to be a redoubtable clan. After a gang of armed men demanded to search her house for a runaway slave, the minister's wife Jean did not bat an eyelash. "If you do not hereafter keep away you will feel...
...other half of The Raven, however, is songs, the best of which are a continuation of the weary romantic journey Reed has been on since his Velvet Underground days. None are verse-chorus-verse accessible, but Perfect Day and the fiery duet I Wanna Know (The Pit and the Pendulum), with the Blind Boys of Alabama, prove that Reed is still attuned to the knocking on his own chamber door. "One thinks of what one hopes to be," he sings mournfully, "and then faces reality." --By Josh Tyrangiel