Word: fraziers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Frazier's first book, Dating Your Mom (1986), collected a decade's worth of his hilarious short humor pieces, most of which first appeared in the New Yorker. Then came Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody (1987), which contained five pieces of New Yorker nonfiction. These displayed Frazier's tenacious reporting skills and whimsical self-consciousness: "I had not been in Texas long before I started having millions of insights about the difference between Texas and the rest of America. I was going to write these insights down, but then I thought -- Nahhh...
...Great Plains (1989), though, Frazier wrote his insights down and produced an elegaic history of the vast, flat American heartland. He turns more serious still in Family (Farrar Straus & Giroux; 386 pages; $23), in which the subject is nothing less than a search for the meaning of life, for "a meaning that would defeat death." And he is not kidding...
...Eventually he put nearly everything into two boxes -- the dad museum and the mom museum -- and hauled them back to his Brooklyn apartment. These papers led him to take trips across the country to look at old houses and churches and to interview relatives. The process took years -- Frazier does not say it obsessed him, but his descriptions of his pursuit have that feel about them -- and Family is the result...
...rule, people have a minimal interest in family trees from which they themselves do not sprout. So Frazier may encounter some initial reader resistance, particularly since he was able to track his ancestors back to the 1600s on his father's side and the 1700s on his mother's. There are an awful lot of names to keep up with in the early stages of his story, and their relationships to the author ("Comfort Hoyt, my five-greats-grandfather on my father's side") can dizzy the genealogically challenged...
Despite all the media coverage and national hype, there is a sense that AIDS is something remote, relevant only to small percentages of the population. "HIV and AIDS has forced us to face things that we liked to have behind closed doors," says Linda Frazier, a health educator at University Health Services. "It brings to the forefront all of our differences and hang ups about what the realities of our lives are. We want to believe that it's US versus THEM, the morally right. versus those who just don't act right. We're not willing to address...