Word: hometown
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Patricia Szymczak was 36 years old when she decided to pursue a quest she had contemplated since childhood: finding her mother. Adopted in infancy, Szymczak, a reporter with the Chicago Tribune, attacked the task as if on deadline. She knew the woman's name and hometown from a 1953 Illinois adoption decree, obtained when she turned 18 from her adoptive mother. Szymczak called the local post office, found a retired mailman and got him talking about the family -- her family. She contacted old neighbors, who led her to friends. Some had seen the woman, who now lived out of state...
...apparently oblivious of the martial-law troops who stand at rigid attention under the cover of multicolored beach umbrellas, but because Beijing too exhibits the limits of governmental control. For example, China has strict residency rules. Identity documents guarantee that a person who receives permission to move from his hometown to a new location is still eligible for ration coupons, housing allowances and other subsidies. But even without permission, people have been drawn by the economic reforms to the major cities, and the financial opportunities they have found there more than compensate for their lost stipends. In central Beijing...
...adds, "A lot of the girls here come from small towns, are naive, and think that the guys at Pi Eta will be just like the guys from their hometown. They think that a guy from Harvard has to be a nice guy, but that's not true...
Zawicki's belief in a cost-free route to fortune is what Atlantic City, in its newest incarnation, is all about. Shrine of the shill, hometown of hucksterism, municipal embodiment of the motto "Ocean, emotion and constant promotion," the city has reinvented itself time and time again for the sake of a new hustle. In 1936 its mayor claimed that the Miss America Pageant was a "cultural event." (True, a contestant in last week's pageant -- the 63rd -- did sing an aria from Die Fledermaus, but the event is still more about swimwear than opera.) During the Prohibition...
JERUSALEM: CITY OF MIRRORS by Amos Elon (Little, Brown; $19.95). "Where there is so much destructive memory, a little forgetfulness may be in order," concludes one of Israel's best-known writers in this anecdotal history chronicling 4,000 years of trouble in his hometown...