1. Skiing

      There is, perhaps, no other sport in the world quite so exciting as skiing. For viewers, it is a spectacle of unsurpassed beauty. For skiers, it is a vivid personal experience, a thrilling test of mind, muscle and nerves.

      More and more Americans are discovering this thrill for themselves. Not too long ago, skiing had virtually no part in the American sport scene. If it were thought of at all, it was purely as a European sport. Then came the 1932 winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York. Americans got their first good look at skiing and made for the hills. Today ski trains make regular runs from our cities to the great, white outdoors.

      In addition to joy and exhilaration, skiing offers other attractions. It is a comparatively inexpensive sport, and, for the young, the art of skiing is often mastered in a very short time.

      The special thrill of skiing is well described by Suddy Werner. "It's all up to you," he says, "No teammates can help. You're alone. It's you against the snow, the mountains, yourself. You're a warrior."

2. An Act in Modern Diplomatic History

      That afternoon, the greatest disappearing act in modern diplomatic history was to unfold. It had all been worked out meticulously in advance between the White House and Pakistan's President Yahya Khan.

      The plan worked smoothly. First, Kissinger paid a ninety minute courtesy call on the President. Next, the word went out, as previously arranged, that the  visiting American, exhausted by the long journey, would have to cancel a formal dinner in his honor and would be driven to the eighty- five-hundred-foot-high hill station of Nathia Gali for a brief rest. The next day, July 9, the Pakistan  government announced that Kissinger would be forced to extend his stay in Nathia Gali because of a "slight indisposition"—"Delhi belly"; some reporters called it, a common enough problem for fast- moving travelers.

      As part of the cover, the trip to Nathia Gali was to be as conspicuous as possible. So a decoy caravan of limousines, flying the flags of the United States and Pakistan and accompanied by a motorcycle escort, rolled through the streets of Islamabad and up into the mountains.

      To preserve the fiction, the government kept a steady stream of visitors driving from Islamabad to Nathin Gali to pay their respects to the indisposed  traveler. The Chief of Staff of the Pakistan army, the Minister of Defense, and a score of other officials dropped in to inquire about Kissinger's health. All were intercepted by Khan. He'd serve them a cup of coffee and tell them that Kissinger was resting and could not be disturbed.

      Actually, Kissinger had never gone to Nathia Gali.

    3. How Should One Read a Book?

                                       by Virginia Woolf

      It is simple enough to say that since books have classes—fiction, biography, poetry—we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish  all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the  presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite.

      The thirty-two chapters of a novel—if we consider how to read a novel first —are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building; but  words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you—how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was  comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment. But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand confliction impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasised; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist —Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better able to  appreciate their mastery...

4. The Delights of Books

      Books are to mankind what memory is to the  individual. They contain the history of our race, the discoveries we have made, the accumulated knowledge and experience of ages; they picture for us the marvels and beauties of nature; help us in our difficulties, comfort us in sorrow and in suffering, store our minds with ideas, fill them with good and happy thoughts, and lift us out of and above ourselves.

      When we read we may transport ourselves to the mountains or the seashore, and visit the most beautiful parts of the earth, without fatigue, inconvenience, or expense. Many of those who have had all that this world can give, have told us they owed much of their purest happiness to books. Macaulay, a Britain historian,writer and statesman, had wealth and fame, rank and power, and yet he tells us in his biography that he owed the happiest hours of his life to books. He says: "If  any one would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, gardens, fine dinners, wines and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I should not read books, I would not be a king. I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading."

      Books, indeed, endow us with a whole enchanted palace of thoughts. In one way they give us an even more vivid idea than the actual reality, just as reflections are often more beautiful than real nature.

      Without stirring from our firesides we may roam to the most remote regions of the earth. Science, art, literature, philosophy, all that man has thought, all that man has done, the experience that has been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations, all are garnered up for us in the world of books.

5. Calgary: Canada's Not-So-Wild West

      by David S. Boyer

      THE WEST, for a century dirt-farm poor and ignored by the more industrialized eastern provinces of Ontario and Quebec that control Canada, has lately begun to sway the nation's entire economic structure. And that has drawn the earnest attention of lots of eastern Canadians, who voice pride and concern.

      Calgary's new high-rise banks and oil-company skyscrapers, sandwiching the towers of investment and insurance compaines, are home base for a flamboyant collection of Canadian millionaires and big consortia and astronomical contracts, all representing incalculable consequences for Canada's political future. The West has recently been hard hit by recession, but its continuing sense of power, centered in Calgary, stands in ongoing confrontation with the federal government at Ottawa, over taxes and prices and freight rates and socialistic policies. For a century there has been alienation, and even talk of secession, though separatist sentiment has now receded.

      The western dynamo shoots out sparks from Calgary, by plane and phone and computer and satellite, to every corner of the nation and, indeed, the world. And now Brian Sawyer was telling me how he perceives this hustling delirium of   620,000 people and more than half as many cars, and their new houses and condos grazing out in all directions like the undisciplined herds of buffalo that once  roamed these hills and prairies.

      Out the window over Brian's shoulder, as a stage back drop for this whole improbable scene, rose the serrated wall of the Rockies, etched in snow and ice, jagged as a giant bread knife along the western horizon.

      "Nobody can claim credit or take the blame, "the chief was saying." This city just exploded. We didn't know what hit us."

      "Yes, crime did go up faster even  than the population —crime and drinking and divorce and suicide. For ten years we averaged 58 new Calgarians a day—an inundation of money-hungry people from everywhere. What can you expect when strangers pile in on each other like  that? You can see for yourself what we had here. Uncontrolled growth."

      "It has all cooled down now—including, I'm happy to say, the crime. Our timetable has been stretched out, but we could still be the prototype 21st-century city of the planet. The slowdown, meanwhile, is making the place more manageable and more livable."