Word: booth
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...Martin Booth's first day in Hong Kong in 1952, his parents took him to lunch at the British naval base where his father was about to start work. There the seven-year-old was confronted with a frightening plateful of leggy crustaceans unknown back in England. As he recounts in Gweilo, a memoir of his first three years in the former crown colony, a naval officer briefed him on local customs: "Whenever someone offers you something to eat, accept...
...Booth followed the advice, ingesting more new food, culture and adventure in those three years than most people manage in a lifetime. He eventually returned to Britain, supported himself as a truck driver, legal clerk, wine steward, English teacher and, only after he turned 40, a writer. But that boyhood hunger for discovery would help shape 13 novels, six books of children's fiction and 10 nonfiction works of history, biography, criticism and reportage. Add his mountain of articles, television scripts and poems, plus the 400 books by other poets (including Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney) that...
...Many kids know his Music on the Bamboo Radio, about a boy stranded in Hong Kong by the 1941 Japanese invasion. Conservationists value Booth's many books and TV documentaries on African wildlife (he spent a few years in Kenya). There's also his 1985 international best seller Hiroshima Joe, the tale of a captured British soldier who survives the first atomic bombing. And Booth's Industry of Souls was short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize in 1998 (after being rejected by major publishers and picked up by a small imprint for a pitiful $1,800 advance...
...retailer eFashion Solutions and self-described "hick from the sticks," was lingering near the display booth for Rocawear, rapper Jay-Z's apparel line, at a fashion trade show in Las Vegas in February. Suddenly hip-hop impresario Damon Dash, who is Rocawear's celebrity CEO and JayZ's longtime business partner, grabbed Foy's hand and leaned his shoulder against Foy's--"a half a hug," Foy calls it. "eFashion Solutions. Nice," a smiling Dash told Foy. "Real nice." Dash dished out "props" for good reason: powered by eFashion's Web design and marketing, Rocawear is on pace...
...Gweilo should rescue Booth from relative obscurity, if only for the story behind it. Two years ago, as the author was battling brain cancer, his children asked him to set down an account of his formative years while he still could. Booth finished just before dying in February. He was buried in his favorite cowboy boots - he had developed a fondness for the American southwest. Don't look for anything morose here. Gweilo is sometimes a bit novelistic for a memoir, but it is alive with delight in the new. The boy's golden hair is considered good luck...