Quotes from Hampton Sides

was an exotic curiosity all the more endearing for

Yakutsk was widely considered the coldest city on earth—a designation it still holds today—and the world's largest city built entirely on permafrost.

The exodus of this whole people from the land of their fathers is a touching sight," Carleton wrote. "They have fought us gallantly for years on years; they have defended their mountains and their stupendous canyons with heroism; but at length, they found it was their destiny, too, to give way to the insatiable progress of our race.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations. —BARBARA TUCHMAN

Probably the biggest influence on my career was the late John Hersey, who, while he was at 'The New Yorker,' wrote one of the masterpieces of narrative non-fiction, 'Hiroshima.' Hersey was a teacher of mine at Yale, and a friend. He got me to see the possibility of journalism not just as a business but as an art form.

I've sort of been an anthropologist of modern America, in a non-academic way. Whether it's Marines or Tupperware salesladies, high end audiophiles or bike couriers, I'm fascinated by the hallmarks of the American tribe.

America is an archipelago of tribes, a land where people form national families of kindred spirits.

The forties are the time when you begin to take notice of certain aches and pains. Your body and brain behave in inexplicable ways: Less hair on your head, more in your ears and nostrils. More memories in the bank, less synaptic firepower with which to access them. Gravity has started to show its inexorable pull.

I love Memphis, I guess you could say, in the way that you love a brother even if he does sometimes puzzle and sadden and frustrate you. Say what you want about it, it's an authentic place. I was born and raised in Memphis, and no matter where I go, Memphis belongs to me, and I to it.

By the age of nine or ten, I knew that I loved history and writing. It got hold of me and never turned loose.

Yet Wallace and other segregationists created an inflamed environment in which a confused but also ambitious man like Ray could think it was permissible, perhaps even noble, to murder King. The signals Ray was picking up enabled him to believe that society would smile on his crime. What

As the Jeannette drew nearer to the equator, the waters became oily calm and teemed with eels, tortoises, and dolphins.

Luck in combat is fickle," Barber once said. "But I've noticed through the years that those who make the best preparations enjoy the best luck.

I follow the scent of falling rain And head for the place where it is darkest I follow the lightning And draw near to the place where it strikes —NAVAJO CHANT

The degree to which a society is civilized can be judged by entering its prisons.

from his legs like an untethered weight. In their thousands the parasites

The new policy was tantamount to apartheid, to be sure. But if it was predicated on the prevailing racism of the time, it was also fueled by an emerging humanitarian concern that whole tribes were truly on the brink of expiration—becoming, in Carleton's alarming phrase, Children of the Mist.

horizon, he would race back to the hogan, covered in a rime

at a place not far from their actual

He practiced the code of swift reprisal that was almost universally practiced by the Indians themselves: Failure to strike back, he understood, would only be interpreted as weakness and inevitably lead to an even bolder assault.

A stagnant navy," noted one maritime scholar, "was no place for a man on the make.

The Navajos were another matter. Theirs was a sprawling nation, wealthy in stock, obdurate in its ways, open to change but only on its terms.

This legendary effort—which Navajos who live around Canyon de Chelly insist to this day is entirely true—allowed the three hundred refugees on Fortress Rock to outlast the siege and slip from Carson's long reach. They were never captured.

more than 150 years later, these crude breastworks are still in place). At dusk the men picked the meatiest of their stringy mules and slaughtered them for a thin gravy dinner. From that day on, this forlorn spot would be known as Mule Hill.