Word: clans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cultural and technological difference--a world, in other words, both completely different from and identical to our own. In Matter (Orbit; 593 pages), Banks' first Culture novel since Look to Windward, one of those technological gulfs opens up within a family: Djan Seriy is born into a royal clan on a backwater planet, but she is recruited into the Culture. Her brother Ferbin remains behind on their primitive home world. (Which is, incidentally, not a regular planet but a Shellworld, a synthetic planet constructed as a set of concentric spheres. At its center dwells a massive, near omnipotent alien deity...
...History Channel special scheduled for March 2 would appear to risk a fine academic reputation on what might be called a shaggy Ark story. But the professor has been right before, and his Ark fixation stems from his greatest coup. In the 1980s Parfitt lived with a Southern African clan called the Lemba, who claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel. Colleagues laughed at him for backing the claim; in 1999, a genetic marker specific to descendents of Judaism's Temple priests (cohens) was found to appear as frequently among the Lemba's priestly cast as in Jews named...
...breadwinners (Kazuhito and his father Takeo manage a rice mill); the able women (Noriko and Kazuhito's mother and sister and grandmother) cook and clean while babysitting Kazuhito's mentally handicapped younger brother and nursing both his bed-bound grandfather and his great-grandmother Ei, the clan's 97-year-old matriarch. "Beyond age and gender," reflects Noriko, "here was the model of a true family, a genuine family...
...surviving Inzerillos had been "allowed" to flee their home island by the then Sicilian boss of bosses Toto Riina. The bloodthirsty capo had killed dozens of their brothers, cousins, uncles and fathers in a mob war in the early 1980s, a conflict that cemented Riina's Corleone clan as the supreme rulers of Sicily's crime syndicate, also known as Cosa Nostra. Mafia experts say Riina was on his way to exterminating the rest of his rival clan when their American relatives and associates - including members of New York's Gambino family, of whom John Gotti, the infamous dapper...
...troubles plaguing contemporary Egypt. The saga of the inhabitants of a downtown Cairo apartment building, it examines the historical, social and political vicissitudes that Al Aswany believes have left the country in a state of physical and moral ruin. One character, Zaki Bey, is the scion of an aristocratic clan, an Egyptian Romeo who uses his Yacoubian Building office for lecherous assignations, oblivious to the crumbling edifice around him. At the lower end of the social order are characters who reside in shacks on the building's rooftop; Taha is the earnest son of the building's doorman, and Busayna...