this face not drawn but instead sculptured in something smooth and friable

the rock grows friable and flaky slates choke the soil of terraces

there is in every child the essentially human urge to reshape the earth, to act upon a friable environment (unless he is a born Marxist or a corpse and meekly waits for the environment to fashion him)

The dense, novelistic detail of Perlstein’s books has a purpose: to remind us of a friable, dispirited, suspicious country, more skeptical of its own myths, that now seems unimaginably distant