Word: aunt
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John McPhee's and Joe McGinniss's books on Alaska appealed to the national myth of God's country and the manly fantasy of Huck Finn's flight from Aunt Sally and her civilizing ways. In the 49th state, one confronted a mystical vastness in which solitude is often confused with freedom. John Rothchild is drawn to a less awe-inspiring part of America: Florida, where the descendants & of the King and the Duke turned swamp into playgrounds and retirement pastures...
...mother's patrician parents, who helped raise her in a grand Virginia house, have both died. Then her father is killed in a car accident. Justin's mother must transplant her and her younger brother to a village in upstate New York, to the tidy, stultifying suburban home of Aunt Mona, the late husband's sister. Stunned by her losses and longing for the old days "before everybody started dying," Justin mopes and takes solitary bike rides through this alien Yankee territory. On one such foray, she discovers a tumbledown hut by the side of a pond and decides...
...custody of Olga by the terms of her 1973 divorce from Peters, she refused to allow the child to visit her father at Taliesin West. Thus thwarted, the busy architect rarely went to see Olga and, though he corresponded with her, remained a more remote figure than Olga's aunt, Margedant. It was "Aunt Marge" who was to provide Olga with her strongest American roots. The child stayed with the Hayakawas in Washington, when her uncle was in the U.S. Senate from 1977 to 1981, and visited them in California...
Svetlana did not immediately tell Olga that she was going to take her to the Soviet Union. Instead, she attempted to cut the child's lifeline to the U.S.--perhaps her cruelest act. Wildly misconstruing a letter from Margedant Hayakawa, Svetlana sought to convince Olga that her aunt no longer cared for her. Olga then signed a typed letter that said she would stop writing to all members of the Peters family. At least one line of the letter sounded more like Svetlana than Olga: "All right, kill me, send me a letter bomb if you like." Says Olga...
...pamphlet composed by the painter James McNeill Whistler, who "writes in an offhand, colloquial style, much besprinkled with French--a style which might be called familiar if one often encountered anything like it." Holding at arm's length a novel by Louisa May Alcott (Eight Cousins: or, the Aunt-Hill), he mentions the opinion of some foreigners that American children are ill- behaved: "If this is so, the philosophic mind desires to know the reason of it, and when in the course of its enquiry the philosophic mind encounters the tales of Miss Alcott, we think it will feel...