Word: mother
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Those Left Behind A week after the daring July 2 operation that freed former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and 14 others, some have expressed concern that the high-profile rescue did nothing to aid the nearly 700 others still held by Colombia's FARC rebels; one captive's mother referred to Betancourt as a "trophy hostage." Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whose revolution inspired the group's creation in the 1960s, called for an unconditional release of all FARC captives, while stopping short of asking the group to surrender. Meanwhile, two rebels detained in the rescue face extradition...
...chum, How did you acquire such an expansive vocabulary? -Joseph Gerard O'Brien, Newark, DelawareTeaching! It really is from teaching. And also I grew up in a household where my mother was constantly correcting my grammar, and still does. And I love, love, love, love the written word. I'll re-read books, I'll reread passages from books over and over and over, because I just love the way words look on the page. And I have to say as a teacher, I always wanted to raise the bar for my students. I wanted them to wonder and then...
...resentment dissipate? "No," Lessing says. "I can't remember a time I wasn't fighting her." In the book, she recounts their epic battles, including one triggered by a letter her mother wrote accusing her of being a prostitute. On another occasion, her mother phoned Lessing's employer and outed her as a member of the Communist Party. "She was a woman who shouldn't have had children, and she didn't in the life I have given her," Lessing says of the novella. "I'm hoping the fact that women can get jobs makes it impossible for this horrible...
...parts of the book, Lessing softens and reveals her mother's capacity to care. As a former nurse, she brought ointments, stethoscopes and other implements to the village, turning their farmhouse into a makeshift hospital for local people...
With Lessing entering the twilight of her life, it's hard not to read Alfred and Emily as an act of atonement. Drawing on decades of hindsight, she accepts that her mother's war wounds, though less visible, ran as deep as her father's - and she endeavors to heal them. In the novella, she envisions her mother as what she could have been, a teacher and philanthropist, not the "demented" woman that war had made her. The memoir honors that potential, too. "The real Emily McVeagh was an educator, who told stories and brought me books," Lessing writes...