Word: fathering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Founding Father...
...that time Anastasio Somoza Garcia, father of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, was dictator. Somoza was brought to power by the marines in the early '30s and enjoyed Washington's consistent support. Somoza, a fervent capitalist who, like his son, never hesitated to use the state apparatus to augment his personal fortune, was logically enough fervently anti-communist. Given Somoza's anti-communism, Nicaragua's strategic position in the heart of Central America, and the possibility of building a second transisthmian canal through Nicaraguan territory, the U.S. was more than happy to prop up the Somoza regime both militarily and economically...
Brown uses painfully obvious devices to fill the reader in on past events. Out of nowhere, a character remarks: "Did they ever prove that Cassius Rife killed Cora's father?" One of the cast marries a Japanese man. He is apparently the only Japanese in town. No explanation is given of how he got there. When World War II breaks out, we hear that his wife bashes a Fed over the head with an umbrella when they come to take him away to an internment camp. He reappears later in the book, casually, and again no explanation is given...
...parents' lives were unimaginably cruel. Plowing by hand, laboring in the fields from dawn until dusk, his father died of a heart attack in his early 30s. when Crews was not quite two. Not long afterward, his mother married his father's older brother Pascal. The result was catastrophic. Pascal drank, the couple quarreled, and after he discharged his shotgun six inches above his wife's head, she fled with her children to Jacksonville. A few months later, she returned to work the farm herself...
Crews' penchant for the bizarre has been subdued in A Childhood. His father, whom he could not remember, becomes in retrospect a heroic if desolate figure, "fond of lying out with dry cattle" - that is, women who had never given birth. The minor characters are equally memorable: Willalee Bookatee and his family, their black neighbors; the Jew, a peddler whose wagon was crammed with exciting goods; Mr. Willis, the stoic hired hand, who "moved as slow as grass growing" and once extracted a tooth from his own mouth with a pair of pliers. Even the animals - Daisy the mare...