Word: jacob
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Rosellen Brown's plot can be counted on to grab a mother or father by the ventricles. Lying awake in sweaty sheets at 3 a.m., any parent of any teenager ! sees an immediate future more or less like Brown's melodrama: a 17-year-old New Hampshire boy named Jacob, no sulkier or more hostile than the next kid, suddenly goes septic and gets himself into hideous trouble. The cops, in fact, think he has bludgeoned his pregnant girlfriend to death with a car jack. It becomes clear to his parents (who knew nothing about the girlfriend) and younger sister...
Brown, the respected author of Civil Wars and Tender Mercies, is a skilled and subtle observer. She pays careful, measured attention to the reactions of Carolyn, Jacob's mother, a pediatrician who believes that truth is too important for compromise; Ben, a talented sculptor who lies combatively for his son; and Judith, a bright, somewhat withdrawn girl who even before the crime was troubled by her brother's unruly sexuality. But too much care, too much measuring, give the novel a somewhat mechanical quality that prevents it from being first rate. Parents and sister are complex and believable, but seem...
...Moses, Dylan and the couple's biological son Satchel, last week's tabloids trumpeted the more lurid aspects of the rumpus -- such as the offer by Farrow's lawyer to show the court a sheaf of "pornographic" photos that Allen had taken of Soon-Yi -- before Judge Phyllis Gangel-Jacob sensibly called the two stars into her chambers and told them to shut up. But the December ruling has consequences beyond the front page. It sets an implicit precedent for unmarried couples, including homosexuals, to adopt children. Notes Weltz: "Any two single individuals, whatever their persuasion, can now say, 'Look...
...modern parent could turn Tolstoy's famous maxim on its head and say, "No families, happy or unhappy, are alike." But as Judge Gangel-Jacob ponders the evidence to determine whether Mia is a fit mother and Woody any kind of a father, she may conclude that the Sesame Street brood of Farrow's is like every other family. Only more of them. And more...
...splash of orange at the edge of its wings, strikes at night, quietly feasting on the blood of the slumbering victim. Most involuntary donors awaken the next morning itching from what seems to be a mosquito bite. But some immediately develop alarming and occasionally fatal allergic symptoms. Dr. Jacob Pinnas of the University of Arizona suggests that kissing- bug deaths may be underestimated. Some people who die in their sleep and have their death attributed to other causes, he says, may be victims of the not-so-amorous insect...