Word: fostering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Foster has produced a disaster magnitude scale that factors in social disruption, physical damage and injuries, as well as deaths. By his criteria, China's earthquake last August rates a 9.0 score, making it the sixth worst disaster he has plotted. Under the Foster Formula, which does not distinguish between disasters wrought by man and those wrought by nature, the top five are World War II (11.1), the Black Death (10.9), World War I (10.5), Stalin's Great Purge of 1936-38 (10.2) and the 1923 earthquake that devastated Tokyo (9.1). Some rankings will come as a surprise...
...deserted house. Julien steals, falls asleep in class and does not really encourage friendship. His body is covered with bruises, which are not discovered until he is forced to take a physical examination. The police arrest his mother and grandmother, put Julien under state care until a foster home can be found...
Alice in Wonderland is alive and well and living in Margaret Atwood's new novel. She has changed a bit: she operates under the alias Joan Foster, resides in Toronto and writes gothic romances on the sly. But she still has more identities than she knows how to handle, takes pills that make her undergo disconcerting changes of size, and gets into trouble by gazing too long into a looking glass...
Most of the time, Joan Foster is the quietly unremarkable wife of a humorless student radical. In odd stolen hours, she plays mistress to an avant-garde artist who serves as a kind of latter-day Mad Hatter. From both husband and lover, Joan cleverly hides two secret shames: the fact that she produces feverishly romantic gothic novels and her pre-diet-pill memories of a miserably obese childhood. Both are telltale signs of a temperament too florid to suit the doctrinaire, modernist tastes of the men now in her life. One day, seized by a fit of automatic writing...
...baroque mirror." Significantly, the same might be said of Margaret Atwood's writing in Lady Oracle. The novel does not develop; it meanders, circling around and turning in on itself - letting its contours be defined by the chaos of the heroine's psyche. Italicized chunks of Joan Foster's latest gothic romance pop up just when one is expecting the next chapter in her life. The reader is kept off balance by jagged shifts from the comfortable ordinariness of situation comedy to the casual cruelty of slapstick farce to the gripping panic of surreal nightmare...