Tuff

Additional title page description: Description of a new formation (a composite ash-flow sheet), and a discussion of its source in the Fish Creek Mountains of central Nevada.

From Paul Beatty, the author of the Man Booker Prize winner The Sellout, comes Tuff, a novel as fast-paced and hard-edged as the Harlem streets it portrays. Age nineteen and weighing in at 320 pounds, Winston “Tuffy” Foshay is an East Harlem denizen who breaks jaws and shoots dogs and dreams of earning millions from his idea for Cap’n Crunch: The Movie, starring Danny DeVito. His best friend is a disabled Muslim who wants to rob banks, his guiding light is an ex-hippie Asian woman who worked for Malcolm X, and he married his wife, Yolanda, over the phone from jail. He’s funny and fierce, frustrated and feared. And when Tuff decides to run for City Council, this dazzling novel goes from astoundingly funny to acerbically sublime. By turns profound and irreverent, and populated with a hilarious supporting cast, Paul Beatty's Tuff is satire at its razor-sharp best. “An extravagant, satirical cri de couer...Beatty’s blunt, impious, streetwise eloquence has a kind of transfixing power.” —The New York Times Book Review “Masterfully conceived and highly entertaining...Richly textured and unforgettable.”—The Boston Globe

A limited laboratory testing program was conducted on materials cored from two tunnels at the Nevada Test Site, Mercury, Nevada. The materials were grouped into three different tuffs. The purposes of the study were to investigate the loading-rate effects and the response characteristics of the materials from the two tunnels. Both static (rise time of approximately 1 minute) and dynamic (rise time of 2 to 50 msec) hydrostatic and triaxial shear tests were conducted in the U.S. Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station's new dynamic high-pressure triaxial test device. Although the test program was very limited, the test data to provide some insight into the hydrostatic and shear response of the tuff materials tested. (Author).