Word: boyhoods
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...youth, Solzhenitsyn dreamed of writing a history of the revolution. "Then," he recalls, "I never needed anything but Marxism to understand the revolution." He failed to recognize signs of mass terror, like the column of prisoners he remembers seeing pass through Rostov in his boyhood. Solzhenitsyn entered Rostov University to study mathematics in 1936 on the eve of the Great Purges, which sucked millions of innocent people into the camps. He admits that it was only by accident that he was not hired by the secret police when their recruiters came to the university. "I was a fully qualified executioner...
Most galling to Solzhenitsyn was the Christian Science Monitor interview with his boyhood friend Nikolai Vitkevich, who was summoned by Novosti from his home in the Caucasus to Moscow to talk with the Monitor's correspondent. Vitkevich accused Solzhenitsyn of being guilty of the same crime of informing on friends for which the author damns others in Gulag...
...farm-system director." Miller was a college fullback (Notre Dame) until he was sidelined by an injury; his father, Ray T. Miller, was one of the organizers of the Cleveland Browns. "I've always wanted to be an owner like my father," he says. Tippit was a boyhood baseball freak who wanted to keep Cleveland a major-league city. With the authority of a $250,000 in vestment, he helps run the town's base ball team, the Indians...
...during a search for the remnants of Biela's comet that Luboš Kohoutek made his great discovery. Interested in the minor bodies of the solar system since boyhood meteor-and comet-hunting expeditions in the Czechoslovak mountains, he had in the fall of 1971 located a cluster of about 50 small asteroids in an orbit roughly comparable to that of Biela's comet. Last February, using Hamburg Observatory's 32-in. Schmidt telescope, he tried to "recapture" the asteroids, which he feels may be the remaining chunks of the lost comet. To Kohoutek's surprise...
That is where Wilder turns up this time, in the guise of his title character, 29-year-old Theophilus North. Like Wilder, the young North (who remembers his stories in extreme old age) is an escapee from a boyhood variously spent in China, California and Wisconsin, a classics scholar, a master of many languages, an ex-prep schoolteacher and Yaleman. He is also an infernal meddler in other people's business, more or less in the spirit (much diminished) of Jesus, Socrates and George Brush, Wilder's insufferably virtuous hero in Heaven 's My Destination...