Word: johnsonized
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...nice to think that his case was exceptional. But it is the burden of Caryl Phillips' latest searching meditation on outsiders in England that Turpin's story is much too typical. Beside him, in the triptych that makes up Foreigners: Three English Lives, is the story of Samuel Johnson's Jamaican servant, Francis Barber, who ended up in penury, though Phillips' narrator remembers him as "at one time, probably the foremost negro in England." Then there's the story of David Oluwale, a Nigerian who stowed away as a teenager to come to England in 1949, dreaming of becoming...
...aliens. Yet where others complain about history, Phillips sets about remaking it, in more inclusive terms. As befits his theme, this new book is a hybrid, a mix of history, fiction and first-person reportage, its opening section delivered in the 18th century voice of a friend of Johnson's, the closing one in a collection of voices (white, West Indian, African), recalling the quiet, solitary-seeming Oluwale as he walked around the streets of Leeds. Yet all the pieces are linked by a sense of deep loneliness and the bitterest ironies. Barber, like Oluwale, is found in an infirmary...
...Kitts himself, though brought to Leeds as a boy, and now living in New York, Phillips has seen the struggle from both sides. What gives his accounts their particular sting is that even good intentions seem of no avail. Barber, for example, was treated with unwavering kindness by Johnson, who had him educated, saw him almost as a son and worried about what would happen to him after his own death. The Barber story is narrated by a self-styled philanthropist who wishes that "all ebony personages" be resettled in Africa or the West Indies - but only because the English...
...wish I could say I was surprised. In truth, Pats fans already knew that Belichick doesn't play by Marquis of Queensberry rules. This February former linebacker Ted Johnson alleged that Belichick made him practice even after he suffered a concussion and that today he has brain damage so severe that he can barely get out of bed. But in Boston those earlier revelations - like these new ones - haven't hurt Belichick's popularity a bit. And there's only one thing that could: losing...
...decision, of course, is ever the result of one pure motive. Johnson, his biographer Robert Caro argues, always had reservoirs of genuine compassion that his ambition finally allowed him to tap. John Quincy Adams became a principled scourge only after his ambition to be elected President had been gratified (and his ambition to be re-elected denied). Concrete cracks for many reasons. The sound you hear is politics--and human nature--at work...