Word: ida
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...Italian Author Elsa Morante, 65, has turned out a supremely unfashionable book. History: A Novel is a long, slow read. It is almost entirely lacking in sex or suspense; when characters are doomed, Morante sounds a warning well in advance of the event. The novel's main figures-Ida Mancuso, a widowed Roman schoolteacher, and her two sons -are neither witty nor especially bright. Ostensibly the book shows what happens to these three between the years 1940 and 1947, during the ravages of World War II and the uncertainties of its aftermath. In building her story, though, Morante also...
...prefers to use the most obsolete devices of traditional fiction. It seems a century since one act of illicit sex led the heroine to pregnancy. Here, when Ida is raped by a homesick German soldier, little blue-eyed Giuseppe appears promptly nine months later. In bygone books, the children of such misalliances were frequently provided with preternatural or otherwise spooky talents. Hester Prynne, for example, was unsettled by the prescience of her illegitimate daughter Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Similarly, Ida frets naively about Giuseppe's intense otherworldliness. Morante's symbolism is rarely more modern than the 19th...
...life's complexity but as short cuts into the absurdities of conflict and the urgencies of peace. The effects are cumulative. Details are meticulously piled up: the dress and appearance of all the players in a casual card game, the entire contents of a small room that Ida rents. This tangible solidity is threatened by the destructive mania that is called history. Morante prefaces her chapters (each of which deals with the occurrences of a single year) with lists of events that come close enough to scorch the Roman populace: treaties made and broken, victories, slaughters, final solutions, barbarities...
Girls' basketball is an old and proud tradition in Iowa. Youngsters from such towns as Elkader, Creston and Ida Grove have been sinking baskets on makeshift barnyard courts since 1898. The first Iowa girls' championship, in 1919, was contested two decades before the National Collegiate Athletic Association organized its championship tournament for the fellas. Today all but six of the state's 503 high schools field girls' basketball teams...
...Historians] manage to discuss the reform of insane asylums in the first half of the 19th century without mentioning Dorothea Dix, muckraking without mentioning Ida Tarbell, and the Montgomery bus boycott without mentioning Rosa Parks...