Word: bion
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Archias arrives with the first settlers as a boy stowaway. Ragged and kinless, he carries on his forehead the scar of a cut made as an identification mark during the sack of his unknown native city. Grown prosperous and middle-aged in the hilltop village of Phrax, he fathers Bion, who appears later in the chronicle as a sturdy citizen of a city that is still raw but has years of greatness ahead. Bion's son Callias, heir to wealth, enters as an aging and slightly effete scholar. Callias' son Diothemis totters onstage as a feeble and impoverished...
...descriptions are sometimes gravelly with detail, and his style is sometimes thorny, but his tale of a city that never was can teach readers a lot about the cities that really were-and the cities that are. "When we read the story of the development of one city," asks Bion's son Callias, "do we not read the story...
Even as a boy in Nebraska, Bion ("Bi") Shively was crazy over horses. By the time he was twelve, he was a full-fledged jockey, booting them home at the county fairs. At 17, Bi quit jockeying and transferred his affections to harness racing, a sport in which oldsters have long excelled. But a kid rider's hell-for-leather zest could not make do for the good, grey experience required to steer a careering sulky behind a winning trotter or pacer. Bi was still learning the rudiments of the harness sport in 1898 when he was called...