Word: motherlies
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...Only in second grade at the time of 9/11 - I'm now in eighth - I had been utterly confused by the tragic events. However, your article about the heroic efforts of Rick Rescorla and the risks he took for his colleagues sent my mother and me into tears. Rescorla's ability to remain calm and assertive in a dangerous situation is inspiring, and I hope we can learn from his example. Martha Harding, Palo Alto, Calif...
...great golfers of each generation fuse the two approaches. Tiger Woods regularly reassembles his golf swing - sometimes midround - if he feels his technique needs tweaking. But as the son of a Green Beret father and a Buddhist mother, he brings to the game an idiosyncratic brand of mental resilience and focus that is unmatched by his rivals. When Tiger was 13, his father, Earl Woods, hired a Navy clinical psychologist who reportedly used interrogation techniques to test the boy's concentration. "I tried to break him down mentally," Earl once said. "I tried to intimidate...
That sympathetic portrayal, which deletes Emily from his life, gives way to an unflattering portrait of her mother, whose "rough, unkind" hands Lessing loathed as a child. When the family arrived on the Rhodesian farm as part of a scheme to resettle white servicemen in the British colony, Emily anticipated getting rich off sales of maize and throwing fêtes with fellow settlers, only to learn that they were "solidly working-class Scots" with whom she had little in common. Haunted by flashbacks of soldiers dying without morphine, she had a nervous breakdown: "She called her children...
...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...