Word: boyhoods
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gandhi had spent most of his boyhood in Teen Murti (Three Statues) after Nehru had taken it over as the prime ministerial residence. Now the Nehru Memorial, it was the house in which Indira Gandhi had served her father as hostess during the early years of independence. It was an era in which Rajiv and his younger brother Sanjay saw most of the world's major political figures trip through: Presidents and kings, commissars and emerging Third World statesmen. One anecdote relates that the young Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama were missing at the house during a visit...
...money, pretend to believe them. As life in Warsaw disintegrates, Maciek and his aunt live for months with peasants, then are on the run again. Always, food must be scavenged, shelter of some kind found. Eventually the war ends. Maciek has grown taller, noticed girls, had a kind of boyhood. But he is blighted. "He became an embarrassment and slowly died," writes the author. A man who bears one of the names Maciek used has replaced him, but he "has no childhood that he can bear to remember...
Just as the reader, with more than 700 pages still to march, begins to worry about blisters, the youthful Alessandro takes over the narrative. Here, for a very large chunk of the novel's center, Helprin writes with riotous energy and $ sustained brilliance about boyhood, youth and war. There is a strange, dreamlike adventure in the Alps, when Alessandro at age nine or 10 is caught up in a mountain rescue, then in a preadolescent erotic tangle with an Austrian princess. Later there is a splendid silliness in which he taunts a couple of mounted carabinieri while riding his horse...
...sheaf of related stories called The Lost World (boyhood is what has been lost) gives a nicely measured picture of a kindly, weighty father and a narrator-son who has not yet achieved gravitas. But the entirely adult stunner of an otherwise boyish book is a superb story called Smoke, about a failing baseball pitcher who attends the funeral of a teammate. We don't learn why the teammate died, or why the pitcher has lost his stuff, his smoke. All that matters is the single word with which the pitcher answers two terrible questions. The first is asked...
...Rescuing the Bible, Spong brands traditional Catholicism as a "destructive" creed. But he is even more offended by conservative Protestants who take a literal view of biblical exegesis. Spong, 59, held similar beliefs in his boyhood as a practicing Presbyterian, and has admitted that Fundamentalism gave him a "love of Scripture that is no longer present in the liberal tradition of the church." In taking aim at literalism, Spong declares his goal is to reveal the spiritual truths underlying the biblical text. Still, his book lashes out both at the conservative view of the Bible and at its adherents...