Word: brooklyn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...says Lindsay Jewell ’05, one of her roommates, “and public service is a natural avenue for her to express that.” By the end of her freshman year, Hammond’s heart was already set on teaching elementary school in Brooklyn, NY, where she grew up. “I knew I wanted to learn outside the classroom,” she says, which was what had first prompted her to seek out PBHA as a freshman and dive head-long into two of its longest-running programs. She?...
...hero of Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday; 511 pages) is smart, scrawny, sensitive Dylan Ebdus. He's 5 when his parents move to a hard-luck black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Brooklyn. His mom is a hippie, his dad a painter who spends his days on an incomprehensible, unfinishable masterpiece. Soon Mingus Rude moves in down the block. His father Barrett is a once famous soul singer--he fronted the fictional Subtle Distinctions--now in drastic, drug-addicted decline (Barrett owes more than a little to Marvin Gaye). The boys become friends--Mingus the leader, Dylan...
...tough strand still connects the boys, and they fight against all the usual suspects--racism, violence, their parents' failing marriages--to keep it. In the novel's second half, really an extended epilogue, Lethem follows his principals into lives rendered bitter and crooked by the unresolved anger of their Brooklyn beginnings...
Lethem is one of those novelists who get better book by book, from his early science-fiction noodlings to the hard-boiled, atmospheric Motherless Brooklyn. The Fortress of Solitude is a glorious, chaotic, raw novel, and God knows there are any number of ways to pick it apart. Lethem has adopted a furiously literary, poetic style that would look overwrought in the pages of an undergraduate literary magazine, and he gambles on a risky element of magical realism: the boys discover a magic ring that intermittently (it's capricious) gives them superpowers. But Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York...
...walk nine miles from Manhattan to my home in Brooklyn. So the milk turned sour, and the meat went bad. So I couldn't use my computer or watch TV, and I had to sleep outside because there was no air conditioning. But how often do I get to see the stars over New York City? CHAIM THEIL New York City...