Word: childhood
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...invitations to play. Others are revved too high: they annoy other children by crashing into them or hugging too hard. Many can't handle common noises or the feel of clothing on their skin. A number just seem clumsy. Adults can remember kids like these from their own childhood. They were the ones called losers, loners, klutzes and troublemakers. At STAR Center they wear a more benign label: children with sensory processing disorder...
...Much of this gratuitous misery can be read as the blackest of comedy, but there are plenty of other dimensions to Yu's writing besides gallows humor. Narrated in the first person by Sun Guanglin, a sensitive and lonesome soul who's trying to make sense of his bizarre childhood, Cries in the Drizzle stitches together a patchwork of genres - from pastoral vignettes to sweaty cinematic action sequences (a teen threatens to kill his hostage girlfriend with a meat cleaver); disconsolate philosophical observations ("Our lives, after all, are not rooted in the soil as much as they are rooted...
...studies of birth order are too simplistic because they fail to account for an important environmental influence: parents. My younger brother and I are mostly the reverse of the stereotypical firstborn and second-born/last-born. I am more independent than my brother and led a more adventurous childhood. I take after our father, who was a college dropout and more creative. My brother takes after our mother, who was mathematically inclined. Birth order is not the determining factor it once was. Gary Ostrick, LOS ANGELES
...film has an authentic feel, thanks to its use of Afghan children in the lead roles and dialogue in the native tongue. But at heart it's a Victorian novel transposed to war-torn Afghanistan: Dickens spoken in Dari. Every atrocity endured in childhood will face an equal and opposing vengeance at the end; virtually every major character will reappear later; family relationships are not what they seem. Readers (and viewers) don't love books (and movies) like The Kite Runner in spite of these clichés but because of them. The fierce tidying up of ancient grievances allows...
...Bolton's book covers his childhood as the son of a Baltimore fireman, his days at Yale Law School and his service in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. But it's the brickbats he reserves for Rice and fellow diplomats and civil servants in the current Administration that grab the most attention. First as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and then as U.N. ambassador, Bolton emerges as an outspoken unilateralist and an opponent of treaties and international institutions ranging from the Kyoto climate convention to the International Court of Criminal Justice...