Word: booker
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Australian Peter Carey, 57, has built a distinguished career out of offbeat, risk-taking novels. His Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which won Britain's Booker Prize, portrayed two improbable 19th century Aussie dreamers obsessed with the notion of hauling a glass church across the outback. In Jack Maggs (1998), Carey produced an engaging variation on Dickens' Great Expectations. And he is up to new tricks in True History of the Kelly Gang (Knopf; 352 pages; $25), which purports to be a first-person narrative written by Ned Kelly, the outlaw who terrorized and enchanted Australians during the 1870s...
...champion of young writers; after a long illness; in Norwich, England. In 1970, with Angus Wilson, Bradbury founded England's first creative-writing program at the University of East Anglia--to the consternation of British academics, who insisted writing could not be taught. Graduates of the program included future Booker Prize winners Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro...
...disbelief runs all the way up to city hall, where Booker is widely suspected of having his eye on the mayor's office. When Booker got elected, Mayor James told the local paper he worried about people "who try to create an empire and run for higher office." The day Booker moved into the motor home, a four-page anonymous screed was sent to hundreds of city leaders, stating that "Booker himself hates Newark...He is a mere publicity-stunt hound dog who is against everything and for nothing." Over the past three years, Booker's opponents have anonymously accused...
...easy to see why some people would find Booker's record hard to believe: he played tight end for Stanford's football team. At Oxford, he was elected president of the Jewish L'Chaim society--even though he's a Baptist. He's a vegetarian, and says he has never drunk alcohol. And did we mention he once talked a suicidal fellow student out of jumping...
Here's the really annoying thing: Booker is thoroughly unaffected. In fact, he has a little-boy earnestness and optimism that are hard to resist. When he talks about cleaning up Newark, he can barely get the words out fast enough. At one point, when he realizes he's almost forgotten Mother's Day, he actually exclaims, "Jiminy Cricket!" The first night in the motor home, the generator and the engine die, leaving no water, no air conditioning and no way to drive out should there be any trouble. Booker collapses into bed--and gets...