Word: childhoods
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Rome, the papacy seemed doomed to a decline. Six years before, it had been stripped of temporal power beyond the tiny (108.7 acres) Vatican enclave. Only 22 years before that, Pope Pius IX had fled when Mazzini and his revolutionists seized control of Rome. In Pacelli's childhood the world outside the Vatican seethed with anticlericalism and glowed with humanist confidence in the ever onwardness and upwardness of history. Today the papacy and the Catholic Church are immensely stronger. Part of the story is told in numbers: during Pius XII's reign, Catholics throughout the world grew from...
...hymned "The days of our years are threescore years and ten" knew nothing of modern vital statistics; the average life expectancy of an Israelite baby in David's kingdom was probably no more than 30 years. Not until the individual had weathered all the hazards of gestation, birth, childhood illnesses, diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia could he expect to reach threescore...
From earliest childhood, Stagg recalls, "we used to give one or two cents as our church contribution." Food was plain but plentiful: home-grown vegetables dominated the table, eked out with home-fattened hogs (whose bladders "Lon" used for "pigskins" and ball tossing). Lon swam and skated, got into one-hand and three-hand baseball...
Also more rather than less in the aural tradition are two chapters from the novel Cadenza by Ralph Kusack. Each is an episode about childhood in Ireland full of color and suspense. There are times when Kusack's grammar gets the better of the reader, but at least the prose is rarely flat. Description procedes with abrupt transitions and gives an effect resembling the flicker in old movies, but the technique suits the generally continuous action and falters only in a few waiting scenes...
Glaze of Words. Thus, as if she were herself the heroine of a Fannie Hurst novel, she traces her progress from the conventional, middle-class home of her St. Louis childhood to her present, medievally furnished, stained-glass-windowed, triplex apartment in Manhattan...