Word: brahminism
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...World, he has evolved a signature blend of autobiography, artifice and journalism that tests (even by today's liberal definitions) the limits of conventional fiction. Half A Life (Knopf; 211 pages), the latest hybrid, begins in colonial India with a droll anecdote. The son of a Brahmin family marries a low-caste woman and forfeits his social standing. He is a maharaja's tax clerk who, influenced by Gandhi's politics of poverty, makes false account entries in favor of poor landowners. Unwelcome at home and in danger of prosecution, the upstart takes cover as a mute beggar. A touring...
...Wideman, a two-time PEN/Faulkner Award winner, is too old for playground basketball, the game he loves. He is the perfect age, however, to drift back and examine his rise from ghetto prodigy to Ivy League hoops star to literary Brahmin. At all phases playground ball is there, teaching creativity, the difference between "solo triumph" and group participation, and other life lessons. There are too many basketball-is-like-jazz musings, but at its best moments, Hoop Roots brings a touch of Proust to the blacktop...
...narrative, broken into three thinly-connected chapters, begins with an explanation of Willie’s name. His Brahmin father narrates the twisted trajectory of his own adolescent rebellion in India. To spite his family and his caste, Willie’s father becomes a sadhu, or ascetic holy man. By chance, the English writer W. Somerset Maugham meets him while researching The Razor’s Edge. Maugham’s influence on Willie’s father is strong enough that, once a proper wife is found, the son gets Maugham’s first and middle names...
With this constrained focus, the Kellers come to the somewhat structurally rigid conclusion that two changes separate the last 70 years of Harvard history into three distinct eras. First, under the direction of University President James B. Conant 14 (from 1933 to 1953), the University transformed from the Brahmin university of the first third of the 20th century to a meritocratic one. Relying on demographic shifts and the detailed dissection of many of the controversies and developments of the 1930s and 1940s, the Kellers show how the University increasingly embraced the ideal of the best and the brightest, even when...
...cherishes would make the many of the Houses’ namesakes shake in their graves, whether Increase Mather, Class of 1656, who left this conservative Puritan school for a more conservative Puritan community in New Haven, or A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, who hoped to maintain the Brahmin finishing school by creating maximum quotas for undesirables like Jews. University President-to-be Lawrence H. Summers is coming from the Treasury and University President-soon-that-was Neil L. Rudenstine is going to work for an online art consortium; these facts are only strange outside of the context...