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Articles by Rory O’Grady
Fiery pier walk
RORY O’GRADY, Bruce Catton Awards First Place Winner Published 12:00 am EST, Wednesday, December 2, 2020 EDITORS NOTE: This is the last of several essays written by Frankfort High School freshmen for the annual Bruce Catton Award program, which was postponed from April to October. The Record Patriot ran the top three essays written by Dave Jackson’s history students. It was my family’s first summer in Benzie County.
OIL, POWER AND WAR: A Dark History
John D Rockefeller, who made a pretty penny out of oil, offered a predictably upbeat assessment of the energy source that defined the modern world: ‘what a blessing the oil has been to mankind... the whole process seems a miracle.’ The second part of that statement seems reasonable – the first part is a matter for debate.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 TRAINS: A 45,000-Mile Adventure
At this moment in history, long-distance train travel is somewhere in between nostalgically quaint and futuristically revolutionary. It’s perhaps therefore the perfect time for a relentlessly curious and wonderfully descriptive writer such as Monisha Rajesh to delve into this oxymoronic notion of crossing countries and continents by rail – something that undeniably catches people’s attention, despite (or perhaps because of) the dominance of the global aviation industry.
THE ALPS - Geographical
The Alps comprise the great mountain system of Europe. The relatively low base level of these peaks emphasises the majesty of their summits and allows a great diversity of climate and vegetation on various levels. Many valleys contain large lakes, while above the timber line there is a wealth of characteristic plants, and still higher, vast glaciers and a perpetual mantle of snow. Jon Mathieu presents a modern history of this diverse landscape, from earliest times to the present.
THE LIBRARY OF ICE: Readings from a Cold Climate
Ice is the frozen state of water, one of the simplest forms in existence. ‘It is formed of two hydrogen atoms bonded to a single oxygen atom, in a shape that resembles the letter “v”.’ But, simple or not, ‘its behaviour bewilders me,’ writes Campbell. The Library of Ice is an exploration of that bewilderment, an exploration of solid water – heuristically, scientifically and culturally.
COMPANIONS IN CONFLICT: Animals in Occupied Palestine
In 2016, an animal charity relocated ‘the last tiger in Palestine’, Laziz, from the Gaza Strip’s zoo to his new home in South Africa. While many Palestinians came to the zoo to say a fond farewell, others made the cynical observation that it was better to be an animal than a person in Gaza, where even cancer patients often cannot receive permits to leave for treatment. ‘The worst zoo in the world imprisons humans as well as other animals,’ writes Penny Johnson.
THE PASSIONATE IMPERIALISTS
By the time they married in 1902, Sir Frederick Lugard and Flora Shaw had emerged as two of the most dynamic figures of the late Victorian era. Lugard had enjoyed – or, sometimes, endured – a spectacularly wide-ranging military and administrative career: embarking on any number of exploratory journeys and fighting battles from Sudan to Burma, and various points in between.
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