Word: gilead
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...make the cut once the time frame is a decade. But an aging population and increasing demand for health care - that's one shift that's here to stay. Among the top 200 are nearly three dozen companies that sell products and services to the sick and dying, from Gilead Sciences, a biotechnology outfit, to Quest Diagnostics, which administers blood and other laboratory tests, to Ventas, a real estate investment trust that manages hospitals and nursing homes. Another secular trend: more Americans seeking out higher education. Among the beneficiaries are for-profit institutions such as Apollo Group, ITT Educational Services...
What happens when two regions face off, determined to subdue the other? In the Old Testament, the men of Gilead asked fugitives if they were from Ephraim, demanding they utter the now-legendary word “Shibboleth.” Those who pronounced anything different became the enemy; 42,000 were slaughtered in the River Jordan...
Soon another bird returns to the nest: Robert's prodigal son Jack. (What else would he be named?) Jack is a notoriously unemployable drunkard who in his youth stole prolifically, then fathered a child out of wedlock, then fled Gilead. He hasn't been back in 20 years. "I failed as a lowlife," he cracks. "But not for want of--application." A tender, troubled soul, Jack feels desperately guilty about his misdeeds, but at the same time he finds his family's Christian forgiveness unbearable. Glory and Robert are furious with Jack, but at the same time they ache with...
...quote scripture freely, but unlike Dedalus, you can't imagine him touching anybody, even himself. He's more like Lovelace, the libertine villain in Clarissa: a devout person's idea of what a scoundrel might be like. And if we don't know, really know, why Jack left Gilead, we cannot feel what it costs him to come home...
There are grand things in Home. Perfect things, even. The way that Gilead is both idyll and prison to Glory, the birthplace of all her hopes and their tomb. Robert's long, ungraceful dive into death--"Jesus never had to be old," he complains. But the problem of Jack leaves a slackness at the heart of the book, and Robinson never takes it in. Two-thirds of the way through, you're desperate for Jack and Glory to fall into bed together, even if they are brother and sister, just as a gesture of Christian charity toward a reader starved...