Word: motheral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...maggot infested, lie in a heap. Behind the building, skulls bleach in the sun. And just up a slope, an orphaned elephant greedily nurses on a bottle of formula and suckles at the fingers of its human keeper. Unless led away, an orphan will linger by its fallen mother until it collapses from starvation or thirst. And a mature elephant coming across a carcass, even one streaked with vulture droppings, will try to rouse it to life with a gentle prod of its hind...
That is a question Japanese carver Koryu Kawaguchi asks as well. On the outskirts of Tokyo, the 70-year-old master carver sits on a tatami mat, his workbench and tools covered with a fine ivory dust. In his hands is an ivory figurine of the Merciful Mother Kannon, which he has been carving for a month. Beside him sits his son Ryusei, 37, a fourth-generation ivory carver. The elder Kawaguchi is a gentle man with a reverence for the gleaming white medium he has spent his lifetime bringing to life. His eyes are weak from the strain...
...decided to lay some expensive guilt on him for 22 years of neglect. He -- as hapless as any sitcom daddy -- rushes off to rescue her from her low-rent life in Houston. When he gets there, he finds that his daughter is a foul-mouthed, dope-smoking mother of two small children, both of whose fathers are in prison...
...good story to tell. His 1983 memoir, Eleni, pulled the reader into the pitiless Greek civil war of the late 1940s, when Communists fought to destroy the royalist government. Gage told how the Reds came to his mountain village to round up children for indoctrination in Albania. His mother resisted and smuggled him and three of his sisters to safety. For her defiance, Eleni was tortured, shot, and her body thrown into a ravine...
Gage, a former investigative reporter for the New York Times, spent years researching events that led to his mother's murder. The investigator was indistinguishable from the avenger. He eventually tracked down Eleni's inquisitor and interviewed him at gunpoint. But Gage did not pull the trigger. "There are times when I wake up at night and want to get back on a plane and kill the son of a bitch," Gage said. A Place for Us overlaps that past and goes on to embrace less heroic lifetimes, mainly the author's and that of his father. Yet each life...