Word: childhoods
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...joys of childhood are timeless: Swing sets, birthday parties... the occasional school-wide outbreak of head lice. It used to be that a quick dose of a foul-smelling mixture called permethrin (Nix, Rid) and a fierce comb-through were enough to annihilate the bloodsucking pests and their eggs, but now those days of relative ease may be over. According to the results of a Harvard University study of 75 lice-infested children, some lice are no longer susceptible to over-the-counter medicines traditionally recommended by pediatricians. And so kids who come home with a case of head lice...
Born to famed paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary, Leakey spent much of his childhood on his parents' fossil-hunting expeditions, developing a love of the outdoors and a marked independent streak. After leaving school at 16, he at first rejected anything to do with fossils and archaeology for fear of being trapped in his parents' shadow. But by the time Leakey was in his late 20s, his team was making important finds. He wrote books on the origin of mankind and headed the National Museums of Kenya before turning to wildlife conservation...
Rowling says the urge to be a writer came to her early during what she describes as a "dreamy" internal childhood. She began writing stories when she was six. She also read widely, whipping through Ian Fleming at age nine. Sometime later she discovered Jane Austen, whom Rowling calls "my favorite author ever." She was writing a novel for adults when, during a 1990 train ride, "Harry Potter strolled into my head fully formed." For the next five years Rowling worked on Book One and plotted out the whole series, which will consist of seven novels, one for each year...
Rowling insists that she never consciously set out to write for children, but that working on Harry Potter taught her how easily she could tap into her childhood memories. "I really can, with no difficulty at all, think myself back to 11 years old [Harry's age when the series opens]. You're very powerless, and kids have this whole underworld that to adults is always going to be impenetrable." That's a good description of the social setup she portrays at Hogwarts, where the students have stretches of time with little or no adult supervision. Rowling believes young people...
Shingles? I recalled that my father had been afflicted by this strange ailment, but I knew little about shingles until I did some digging. I learned that shingles could be thought of as the revenge of the chicken pox, or of varicella-zoster, the virus behind this childhood disease. A close cousin of herpes simplex, which causes cold sores, varicella-zoster can be beaten back by the immune system but never eradicated. Like a bandit pursued by a posse, it retreats to a safe haven--bundles of nerve cells in the spinal cord or cranium. There varicella-zoster lies dormant...