Word: fatherly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...what is the role of George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker in creating the emerging post-postwar European order? Until now the U.S. Administration has seemed like a father pacing in a waiting room: proud that things have come so far, intensely interested in the outcome, but not able to do much more than drum his fingers -- and worry quietly about whether the baby will be healthy...
...romping naked with the pack of family dogs -- "a Lady Godiva with a pitch-black mane," whose fierce nurturing exuberance was in utmost contrast to the coddling anxieties of a beautiful, irascible Viennese mother. Mama believed she had gone below < her station in the polyglot provinces of the Bukovina. Father was sexually unfaithful to her and volcanic in temper; an anti-Semite who despised Nazis as Untermenschen; a watercolorist, photographer and architectural historian whose diversions included dragging a dead wild boar through the hall and up the stairs in the course of a soiree. Above all, Baron von Rezzori...
Keep the Change chronicles the cross-country escapades of Joe Starling, a blocked painter who endeavors to "put his old life to an end" by stealing his girlfriend's car and setting out from Florida to reclaim the Montana ranch left to him by his father. As the plot progresses to its ironic denouement, Joe courts his teenage sweetheart, rekindles a love affair with the land and comes to terms with some family ghosts -- both dead and alive. Like most McGuane protagonists, Starling is at a gallop between his past and future, an existential cowboy with good intentions...
...when a disagreement with a boyhood chum over the description of a sunset ended in a fistfight. "It was my first literary skirmish," he says. Born and raised in Michigan, McGuane was introduced to the outdoors and a stern Irish work ethic by his father, an auto-parts manufacturer. McGuane early on developed an "adventurous image" of what a writer should be from Horatio Hornblower novels and books about World War II. "I saw myself on the deck of an Amazon steamer or something," he recalls. At Michigan State, McGuane edited a literary journal and shunned the budding hippie drug...
Readers not familiar with Sinyavsky's style or the content of his life may have difficulty with the half-submerged facts. He was born into an affluent family in 1925. His father, who appears in the book as a brilliant though ineffectual figure out of a Chekhov play, was a revolutionary but not a Bolshevik. He was individualistic and something of an eccentric pragmatist. While waiting to be drafted during World War I, he practiced writing with his left hand in case he lost his right...