Word: geoffrey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Judging by its subtitle, "Memoirs of My Father," and its ominous preface, "Opening the Door"--in which the author "thanks God" for his father's death--Geoffrey Wolff's Duke of Deception seems to belong to this nightmares-in-the-nursery trend. But the initial likenesses are misleading; unlike his fellow excavators of the past, Wolff's maturity enables him to emerge--after a respectable period of thrashing--from the muck. He unflinchingly lays out the shoddiest episodes of a shameful upbringing, yet from this scrutiny he extracts a peace with that segment of his life over which...
...deal with being left behind by my father." Duke left behind his son both literally--deserting the family in the mobile home mecca of Sarasota, Florida, for a financially-draining fling on Vancouver Island--and emotionally--substituting "glittering things" for fatherly affection. Continuing the precedent set by Geoffrey's grandfather, Duke discovered "love's shortcut through stuff," lavishing filched motorboats and sportscars on his child...
...Geoffrey did not ask where the money came from, as he did not pry into his father's suspect background. The stakes were too high. As a child he based his own legitimacy on his father's identity; if his father did not exist, neither did he. So, he blindly trotted off to Harvard-Yale games with father, who rooted passionately, "as though he had a stake in its outcome." Duke even went so far as to buy English bulldogs to suggest his connection with Old Eli. Despite gaping holes in the Ivy League story--a friend once hailed Duke...
...modern Sava Center, where the I.M.F. sessions were held. Cecil de Strycker, governor of Belgium's central bank, confided: 'The only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain any more.' Many delegates joined in what Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Geoffrey Howe, aptly described as a kind of 'competitive gloominology...
NONFICTION: African Calliope, Edward Hoagland -Onward and Upward in the Garden, Katharine S. White - The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff -The Intricate Music, Thomas Kiernan - The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas -The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe -The White Album, Joan Didion