Word: clan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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William Clay Ford Jr. knows it would have been easier to take the money and run. He's a fourth-generation favored son of America's first industrial family, a clan so ludicrously wealthy the members have their own accounting firm to manage their allowances. Life could easily have been a dividend-enriched affair of multiple parties, multiple mansions and multiple marriages, the big challenges being to avoid alcoholism and choose the right charity boards...
...Some of Ursula's people, for instance, were among the first modern humans to arrive in Europe, while others of her group came from the Middle East much later. The clan of Helena, the most common matrilineal ancestor of modern Europeans, is thought to have emerged from Ice Age refuges around the Pyrenees and migrated northward as the ice sheets began receding around 13,000 years ago. Velda's people similarly dispersed northward from the Iberian Peninsula, while Tara and Katrine's clans spread northward from present-day Italy. The descendants of Xenia are thought to have spread from...
...large family, we're the marrying kind. We're just not the staying-married kind. My father has been married so many times that the word umpteenth accompanied his most recent wedding announcement. This constant journey by members of my clan in and out of marriages--including my own failed union--has made me study the institution the way a lepidopterist studies butterflies pinned under glass. It has also made me wary of people who claim to have the answers to what makes a marriage work...
...however, add a footnote. As fall approached, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, the irascible and slightly infamous patriarch of the Kennedy clan, called me up to muse a bit about that hot summer (Berlin Wall, Khrushchev blasts at the Vienna Summit). The conversation went something like this: "I tell you, Hugh, Jack is the luckiest guy I know. He could fall into a pile of manure and come up smelling like a rose. The Bay of Pigs and the other things were the best lessons he could have gotten and he got them all early. He knows now what will work...
...just because Nanapush, the raffishly funny Ojibwe storyteller, and various members of the Kashpaw clan--major players in other Erdrich books--show up again in The Last Report doesn't mean that the new novel stints on surprises. The biggest one is revealed early. Erdrich's fans have met Father Damien Modeste and Agnes DeWitt before. Now these two merge into one person...