Word: boyhoods
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Time was when a small American who got vaccinated and looked both ways before crossing streets had a reasonable chance of outliving boyhood. But a new complication has been added. A recent treatise on the subject seriously inquired: "Can Junior fall instantly, face down, elbow out, forehead on elbow, eyes shut? Have him try it tonight as he gets into...
...environment is seriously threatened by the prodigal garbage of the world's richest economy. In the President's own boyhood town of Whittier, a part of metropolitan Los Angeles, the once sweet air is befouled with carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, lead compounds, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, fly ash, asbestos particulates and countless other noxious substances. The Apollo 10 astronauts could see Los Angeles as a cancerous smudge from 25,000 miles in outer space. Airline pilots say that whisky-brown miasmas, visible from 70 miles, shroud almost every U.S. city, including remote towns like Missoula in Montana's "big sky" country...
Politicians often succumb to the constant pressure for a stirring personal anecdote. During his abortive run for the presidency in 1987, solidly suburban Senator Joseph Biden appropriated scenes from the coal-mining boyhood of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. To make a point about welfare dependency, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said his sister was once so dependent on handouts she would get "mad when the mailman [was] late with her check." In fact, she worked most of her life...
...Lion Throne in Lhasa and inducted into a formidable course of monastic studies. By the age of six he was choosing his own regent, and by the time he was 11 he was weathering a civil uprising. The Dalai Lama has written with typical warmth about his unworldly boyhood in the cold, dark, thousand-room Potala Palace, playing games with the palace sweepers, rigging up a hand-cranked projector on which he could watch Tarzan movies and Henry V, and clobbering his only real playmate--his immediate elder brother Lobsang Samten--serene in the knowledge that no one would readily...
...only episode in Boyhood that might pass for an explanation comes in the final two lines: "How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?" Why God has chosen the 13-year-old Coetzee as designated rememberer is desparately unclear. It's a lame ending to a memoir that skirts, but never directly probes, the author's inner life...