Word: motheral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...father A.L. Kroeber was a renowned anthropologist, and her mother Theodora wrote nonfiction, principally on the American Indian. Those who do not know these facts about Ursula K. Le Guin could probably deduce them from her 23rd book. Always Coming Home can be read as a novel, but it is really something else: a scientific-looking compendium of information about a people who might exist in the distant future. They are called the Kesh, a gentle tribe living in the nine towns of the valley of the river Na, somewhere in Northern California. Le Guin's fieldwork into their rites...
...fifth of the book, it provides an accessible focus for the bigger picture that Le Guin wishes to convey. Stone Telling looks back on her childhood, when she was called North Owl (Kesh people change their names whenever it seems appropriate to do so). She lives with her mother and grandmother in a matrilineal society whose rituals harmonize with nature and the passing seasons. She studies the habits of animals and learns the Kesh song of happiness and praise: "Heya hey heya heya heya...
Every town ought to have a place like the Pastures. For as long as anyone in Holbrook can recall ("For ages and ages," one mother says), the children of this Boston suburb have used the expanse of vacant land as their exclusive preserve, a wild place, slightly apart. It is all-purpose terrain, perfect for many kinds of serendipity, a place where kids can build a secret fort, practice daredevil bike riding over hillocks called the Camel Humps, share the painful silences of adolescent romance or even read a book alone...
...Donnell had been a sociable, rambunctious sort: he and his pals at the Pastures used to have epic moon-glob fights, and apparently he was always up for a roll in those big metal drums. He had also worked one teenage summer at Baird & McGuire, according to his mother. Two years after he died the EPA made Holbrook infamous. "The night it came across on the news that Baird & McGuire was the 14th worst site in the nation," says O'Donnell, "it was like lightning. I thought, 'I have an answer!' " The same answer, she thinks, explains why Mark...
...stage, giving it a disarming, storybook two-dimensionality. There is the wolf-suited Max (Soprano Karen Beardsley), a youthful holy terror who hangs his Teddy bear and decapitates his toy soldiers. There is Max's snug bedroom, where he is commanded to repair without supper after his mother (Mezzo Mary King) loses patience with his antics. Just as in the book, the room blossoms into an enchanted forest and is, in turn, transformed into a broad ocean upon which floats a bark named Max that takes the boy to the volcanic land of the Wild Things. Even the smoke-snorting...