Four Corners - Hardcover

9781571970794: Four Corners
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Here's a model family man, tremendously successful in his public life as the powerful czar of the nation's proposed 21st century transcontinental bullet train, The Windjammer. Worthington Rhodes is highly respected, even by the President of the United States. He has everything going for him: support from Congress, the construction industry, suppliers, labor unions, and according to the latest D'Camp-CNN opinion poll, the general public.

We first see him in the Dulles Airport where he is to meet his estranged father, "Dusty", an eminent archaeologist who is arriving from Athens to join with the renowned Dr. Anna Ardmore on her forthcoming Southwest excavation in the Four Corners. Worthington has taken his little daughter Emily with him, hoping to avoid an unpleasant confrontation with his father in which he might lose his temper as he had in an adolescent fracas twenty years earlier.

Preservationist Anna Ardmore, beautiful, vivacious, obsessed with the prehistory Anasazi people of the Four Corners, is determined to save their many archaeological sites that are destined to be bulldozed for the wide right-of-way for Worthington's train. She can't fathom how this attractive man can be so insensitive to America's heritage.

In a premeditated scheme Anna seduces Dusty in an effort to get the dirt (so to speak) on Worthington so that she can pressure him into abandoning his project. Dusty, wanting to get even with his son for not becoming an archaeologist and carrying on a three-generation family tradition, tells Anna an unbelievable story that Worthington was responsible for his uncle's death. When she challenges the validity of that yarn, he tells her to talk to Aunt Hattie up there in Maine.

Meanwhile, Anna's fanatical cohort, Quentin Ford IV, chairman of the influential non-profit Institute and Living Museum of Archaeology (ILMA), has his own scheme for doing away with Worthington. After a fund-raising reception for Anna in Washington, D. C., Quentin tells her his plan is the only way to derail the economic development interests supporting the bullet train. Anna, believing Quentin means to assassinate Worthington, pleads for 48 hours to do it her way.

In the never-never world of the coast of Maine, Anna and Worthington meet unexpectedly. Anna has arrived to interrogate Aunt Hattie, but it's Aunt Hattie's funeral that has summoned Worthington. That evening, in an old sea captain's bed and breakfast, Worthington and Anna put aside their public facades for a private night of passion.

An unfaithful Worthington returns to the nation's capital and wife Sara's domestic scene. With Anna dominating his thoughts, he buries himself with work as he prepares for his cross-country promotional tour for The Windjammer.

A self-delusive Anna escapes back to her familiar Four Corners and tries to put Worthington out of her mind, concentrating instead on her immediate task of getting ready for the arrival of the seminarists who will help excavate her Noah's Ark site. Alexander Parish, former baseball star, leads the roster which includes a Houston oil man and his wife, a Wall Street economist, a school teacher, a female banker, Dusty, and Daisy, the woman in short shorts. Isolated from the outside world, they bond together, supporting Anna to the extreme as she forsakes the truth and fabricates an Anasazi discovery in order to focus the whole world's attention on preserving her archaeological wonders.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Publisher:
Four Corners is a word drama of preservation versus progress. As she tells the story of the lengths to which one woman will go to preserve America's Southwestern archaeological wonders, Ruth Clapsaddle-Counts interweaves political, sociological, and philosophical threads which make Four Corners as thought-provoking as it is entertaining.
From the Author:
They laughed at the novelist Jules Verne and his imaginative predictions. Anna Ardmore's find is my fiction, but less than one percent of the ancestral Puebloan sites in the Four Corners Area have been excavated, so who knows whose controversial hypotheses will be proven by discoveries in the years ahead.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherIvy House Pub Group
  • Publication date1998
  • ISBN 10 1571970797
  • ISBN 13 9781571970794
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages199

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Ruth Clapsaddle-Counts; Luis Foyt
Published by Ivy House Pub Group (1998)
ISBN 10: 1571970797 ISBN 13: 9781571970794
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