Word: clan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Family-owned business houses, especially the big ones, like to project an image of unity. And yet they are often driven by internecine rivalries. Neel Chowdhury, a Time contributor, fashions a perceptive novel, The Inheritors, out of that promising and, remarkably, all-but-ignored raw material. The clan in question, India's Lohias, is fictional, but anyone who has followed the tangled histories of Asia's real-life business dynasties will recognize some family lore and a few choice rumors...
...Khans' choice of destination was relatively fortunate. Khan and 15,000 others are the guests of the Tarakai family. On land it owns, inside schools it built, the wealthy political clan has established an impressive relief operation that boasts ambulances, clinics, visiting doctors, a constant supply of electricity and food and a small army of volunteers. But the Tarakais are the exception. An overwhelming majority of Pakistan's newly displaced are living in private homes in towns across the northwest, where they are provided with shelter but are struggling to find food and medical attention. While international aid agencies focus...
Anyway, some kind of royalty; it's hers by birth. Swinton was born into a clan of warrior aristocrats whose Scottish home dates back to the ninth century (they supposedly earned the family name by clearing the area of wild boar), and who served prominently in every major British military and political skirmish for a thousand years. One recent ancestor invented the tank; another helped invent television. Over the millennium the Swintons were deeded huge swatches of prime Scottish real estate; Tilda's father, Major-General Sir John Swinton, a.k.a. the Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire, lives in the family estate...
...idea, I realize, is to lure the Von Drehle clan out of our gas hog and into a phone booth-sized vehicle powered by switchgrass and meditation. Unfortunately, with four kids, all in grade school, we need a minivan. So is this program for us? To find out, I took a ride on the information superhighway to www.fueleconomy.gov, which is an easy way to compare the efficiency of just about every car imaginable...
...arrives at the party uninvited. Kazan manages all this with some flair, but the gears show too much; it's one of those plays where characters keep stumbling into the end of conversations they're not supposed to hear, or witnessing smooches they're not supposed to see. The clan, moreover, seems too derivative - not of real life, but of some hothouse literary fantasy world: everybody here seems to be either writing a book, has just abandoned one or is brooding over the one that got away. Why don't dentists have these problems...