Word: mothers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...love between mothers and daughters can weather a thousand tiny betrayals. What teenage girl has not grimaced, on occasion, at the spectacle of her mother's perceived inadequacies? And that contempt can flow easily, prompted by no more than a gesture of unwanted maternal affection. Nor are mothers above sin, particularly when their daughters threaten to surpass them...
Elizabeth Strout tests the strength of that umbilical bond in her first novel, Amy and Isabelle (Random House; 304 pages; $22.95). In the small New England town of Shirley Falls, Isabelle Goodrow is a single mother with a shameful secret: her daughter Amy, 16, is illegitimate. As if in atonement for her youthful fling, Isabelle is now, in her early 30s, the image of propriety, maintaining perfect posture and an immaculate French twist. She craves respectability but is too poor for the upper echelon of Shirley Falls and too proud to befriend her co-workers at the mill. Amy shares...
...happens in a high school classroom when Thomas Robertson, a fortyish substitute math teacher, takes notice of Amy, who has inherited her mother's shyness but none of her plainness. When Robertson urges Amy to "come on out...everybody's been asking about you," she complies in ways that she, and certainly Isabelle, never imagined...
...Mother and daughter become rivals, and the balance of power between them shifts inexorably in favor of Amy as she, not Isabelle, discovers love. For Isabelle, it is painful recompense for what she considers a lifetime of sacrifice. Strout's insights into the complex psychology between the pair result in a poignant tale about two comings of age. Amy blossoms with a heady awareness of her sexuality. Meanwhile, Isabelle forgives herself the past, even as she faces its consequences: "It was bewildering to Isabelle. Bewildering that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while you were...
Officials at the National Institutes of Health were delighted that one of their own had struck the mother lode, and they rushed to patent Venter's genes. But across the NIH campus, James Watson, who had won a Nobel for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA and who was then running NIH's Human Genome Project, was outraged. This wasn't science, he insisted. "Virtually any monkey" could do that work, Watson fumed in the opening salvo of a battle that would rage for months--and which smolders to this day. To patent such abbreviated genetic material, said...