Word: brothers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This Boy's Life proves good enough to be unforgettable. Tobias Wolff, 43, is the author of two collections of stories and The Barracks Thief (1984), a critically acclaimed novella. He is also the younger brother of Geoffrey Wolff, whose own memoir, The Duke of Deception (1979), introduced tens of thousands of readers to the bizarre saga of the Wolff family. Although these two narratives have kinship and blood in common, they spring from dissimilar circumstances. The parents split up when the brothers were young. Geoffrey stayed east with his flamboyantly fraudulent father; Tobias drifted west with his mother...
...incredulity of others." Hence he adopts a name, Jack, that he feels suits him better than his real one. An indolent student, he routinely alters his report cards, displaying what he could have done instead of what he did not do. After re- establishing contact with his brother, a student at Princeton, he sees a scholarship at an Eastern prep school as his avenue of escape. He forges his transcript and letters of recommendation: "I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself...
...acquire it, the white man who owned them traded away Doaker's grandmother and father, then a nine-year-old. On this piano, Doaker's grieving grandfather, the plantation carpenter, carved portrait sculptures in African style of the wife and son he had lost. To Doaker's hothead older brother, born under the second slavery of Jim Crow, the carvings on the piano made it the rightful property of his kin, and he lost his life in a successful conspiracy to steal...
...author's account of confrontations with her father, chairman of the board Barry Bingham, and her brother, publisher Barry Bingham Jr., as well as her versions of family and office politics, is too one-sided to be wholly plausible. Bingham's relations with her mother ring truer. At one point the matriarch is quoted as asking why her family could not be happy, since they were all rich, intelligent and beautiful. It is a fair question whose incomplete answer can be found in this resentful and blinkered book...
...another official who was the Soviet ambassador to Cuba at the time) and excerpts from secretly recorded tapes of John F. Kennedy's deliberations with his top advisers. In contrast to the traditional version of the episode, one of the leading hawks, at least initially, is the President's brother Bobby. He is heard suggesting that it may be necessary to "sink the Maine again or something" as a pretext for a U.S. invasion of Cuba...