Word: boyhoods
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Naturalist Gerald Durrell's boyhood memoir, My Family and Other Animals, delighted nearly everyone except his family. The book started as a report on the beginning of young Gerald's lifelong fascination with the animal world. The family, however, kept getting in the way. "It was only with the greatest difficulty," Durrell confessed, "and by exercising considerable cunning, that I managed to retain a few pages here and there which I could devote exclusively to animals." Then, when it was finished, his relatives ragged him for leaving out all the really funny family stories. Obligingly, Durrell...
Birds, Beasts and Relatives, the just published result, is neither sequel nor second volume. It is the very same book, except that all the anecdotes and incidents are different. Durrell's five boyhood years on the Greek island of Corfu are recalled with the same sense of a sun-drenched idylotry as before. The Durrell mythology is broadened to include the story of how a foul-mouthed old sea captain proposed to Durrell's mother. One learns of "Gerry's" visit to Corfu's countess, a dotty and rotund old party who forced him to share...
...parties on the Lusaka diplomatic circuit, Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda often pointed to Vice President Simon Kapwepwe, his close friend since boyhood, and said fondly: "Look, there goes my revolutionary!" It was no casual sobriquet. A bearded, conspiratorial-looking firebrand who wears black and purple togas and carries an outsized walking stick, Kapwepwe was a militant nationalist leader as one of Kaunda's colleagues in the fight for independence from Britain. In a recent about-face, he became Kaunda's chief rival for political power. Last week Kapwepwe more than lived up to Kaunda's billing...
Fallen Among Fabians. As Shaw tells it, his socialist faith began as a personal thing - a bitterness against a class system that he felt at the patched seat of his pants. He writes of his Dublin boyhood as that of "a penniless snob." But if his poverty denied him the class privilege of a university education, it gave him great freedom of mind. He could be depended upon to rush in where pedants feared to tread. At the drop of a bourgeois top hat, he would discourse on Moses or municipal drains, on Marx or Michelangelo. Browbeating the Church...
Double Deaths. After arresting the Green Berets, the Army, both in Washington and Viet Nam, was being closemouthed. Attorneys for the defense, most notably George Winfred Gregory, 31, from Cheraw, S.C., were speaking loud and clear. Gregory, a boyhood friend of Major Thomas Middleton, one of the accused, flew to Saigon last week to handle the case. Authorities in Washington had not been helpful, groused Gregory. "All they were giving me," he said, "was passport instructions." Gregory claims to have it on good authority that last year some 160 double agents were executed, or ordered executed, by Americans. Because...