Word: adrift
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Brazil, a country almost as big as the U.S. (3,287,842 sq. mi.) and with a population expected to reach 200 million by 2000, has been spinning adrift for eleven months, ever since President Janio Quadros quit. Now, in place of a strong presidency, it has a two-headed parliamentary system that isn't working. Bloody riots in the streets, and the possibility of worse ones, last week brought bickering politicians into a semblance of truce...
Jeremy is right; it is the village women who set Augustine adrift on his voyage out of innocence. Shooting in the sea marsh, he has come upon the body of a young girl and carried it home to save it from being devoured by marsh rats. After the inquest, village tongues wag, stones are thrown, and Augustine leaves under a cloud of evil gossip to travel. He chooses Germany because he has cousins there...
...Status Symbol. The child classics run from Dean Swift to Tom Swift, from Defoe and his immortal castaway to Mark Twain's raft, adrift forever on the Mississippi. Alice is still in Wonderland, and the Ancient Mariner is there to remind the buyer that man was a poet before he learned prose and that a child who is fobbed off with baby-talk doggerel is not only being robbed but nudged into the cozy horrors of the remedial-reading set. Treasure Island and The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle may still be bought, and it is a good thing...
Brazil is also adrift in foreign affairs...
Bourgeois Animal. Wilson's Adrift in Soho is about Harry, who felt like "a trapped animal" in his Midlands town. So he came to London with about ?25, a cardboard suitcase and a haversack full of books to practice his trade of being a poet and philosopher. Almost immediately he meets his mate, a New Zealander named Doreen, and his mentor, a sometime actor named Charles Compton Street. Charles introduces him to the fine art of living without working-cadging food and drink, stealing an occasional rare book, sleeping on suburban trains or on somebody's floor. Charles...