Word: iv
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...think of as indefatigable, now using a wheelchair because of the arthritis in her legs; Rosalynn's mother; Sons Chip and Jeff and their wives. Like the President, the other members of the Carter clan seem tired. Chip is holding his six-week-old son James Earl Carter IV in his arms. The baby is asleep and hardly stirs as the President takes him and sits down on a couch to watch a few minutes of the evening news...
This time around, we get to watch Oliver Barrett IV, former model Harvard boy turned lonely do-gooder, deal with the loss of his wife and with his eventual self-discovery. The story picks up 18 months after Jenny's untimely death. Oliver has thrown himself into his work as a crusading liberal lawyer, coping with grief by shutting off all his emotions. He does not allow himself to think about other women, for he is consumed by guilt. In the last chapters of Love Story, Jenny tells "Preppie" not to feel guilty for robbing her of freedom and adventure...
...Story would have possibilities if Marcie Binnendale were the focal point, but Oliver's interior struggle is, and the book suffers as a result. The ill-fated romance is only a sidelight, an indication that Oliver finally has managed to overcome his bereavement. But the confessions of Oliver Barrett IV are conspicuously uninteresting. Page after page, Ollie exorcises his guilt for the excesses of his forebears, who exploited workers for generations in order to accumulate a spectacular fortune. Oliver is in position to inherit the tainted millions he rejected in Love Story, depending on Jenny, fostering his guilt over...
DESPITE THIS SOUL-SEARCHING, Oliver sells out in the end. Oliver III retires, and Oliver IV renounces his decision to abandon the family fortune he rejected so endearingly. At last, Oliver knows who he is--a widowed capitalist returning to the fold after a brief fling with radical chic. The Harvard dream--or nightmare--comes true with a vengeance in this otherwise deadly dull book...
Like Moliere's M. Jourdain, who in middle age found to his delight that he had been speaking prose all his life, a huge number of Americans are raptly if belatedly discovering that they are scions. Everyone-not just Anthony Dupuy Crustworthy IV-has ancestors and, with time, patience and luck, can trace a pedigree and track his progenitors back to Minsk or Marseille, the Isle of Wjght or at least Ellis Island...