Word: boyhoods
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Many of the accounts of Emmet's life have been lost; others have only recently turned up. What the records show seems chiefly pathetic to readers schooled in the calculating and brilliant revolutionary techniques of Marx and Lenin. Unlike those men, Robert Emmet lived, from boyhood to scaffold, in a world of chivalrous, humanitarian dreams-a lovable but fatal hallucination which Author Landreth indignantly blames on Emmet's father, a conventional Protestant doctor of English extraction who didn't let little Robert air his views when grownups were conversing. After several years at Dublin's Trinity...
...Once a reporter (New York Tribune, 1893-94), he continued to be fascinated by printer's ink, lost heavily in four years as owner of the New York Evening Post, backed the Saturday Review of Literature for 14 years, wrote one book of his own (My Boyhood in a Parsonage). Following World War I he shuttled about the world trying to put the financial pieces together (Dawes and Young plans), knew and advised the world's powerful (Clemenceau, Lloyd George). He made a pile of money (reportedly $500,000 in 1931), gave piles of it away, epitomized...
...Great Day in American History--Johnny Shawnessy is married (to a girl from the South) on the day John Brown is hanged; his son is born on the first day of the War; his wife goes mad simultaneously with the Battle of Gettysburg; and so on. His boyhood friends become symbols of American types--the ruthless financier, the self-improving politician, the cynical intellectual. And more subtle symbolism continues, page after page. More and more we see Shawnessy's self-identification with the County, with the river (which flows in the form of the initials of two major characters), with...
...Peck's boyhood, like his current dreams, was up in the air. His parents were divorced when he was a small child, and he was split up and parceled out among relatives, as he was later to be divided among the studios. He felt something like security only with his father, a charming, easygoing ex-basketball star who had failed in business as a druggist and hoped his son might become a doctor. Although Gregory was a handsome boy, he tended to stand back and watch while the cheerleaders and backfield men made off with the only girls...
...only the foggiest notions about modern science and modern thought and throughout his life he indulged in cracker-barrel sneering at intellectuals. He was a confused boy with a great gift for language, whose significance as a writer was, as critic Alfred Kazin put it, "that he expanded his boyhood into a lifetime...