Word: orphan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After one more handgun made it into American history last week (another nastily poignant little "Saturday night" .22 that lay Uke an orphan in a Dallas pawnshop until another of those clammy losers took it back to his rented room to dream on), a lot of Americans said to themselves, "Well, maybe this will finally persuade them to do something about those damned guns." Nobody would lay a dime on it. The National Rifle Association battened down its hatches for a siege of rough editorial weather, but calculated that the antigun indignation would presently subside, just as it always does...
...BartÓk was an orphan of the 20th century. NagyszentmiklÓs, the Hungarian town in which he was born a century ago, was ceded to Rumania in 1920. Nagyszöllös, where he wrote his first compositions at the age of nine, is now part of the Soviet Union. Pozsony, where he spent his teen-age years, has become Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. He died of leukemia in New York City in 1945, a refugee from the war, living at the end in a cramped apartment on West 57th Street...
...picture of Nancy Reagan being knocked off balance by a loving orphan was in its way a subtle lobby for yet another cause, Foster Grandparents. Wonder of wonders, the group has escaped the ax. Jane Russell, whose cantilevered brassiere was the sensation of the movie era that also elevated Ronald Reagan, showed up to plead against changes in children's programs that she supports. Luscious Liz Taylor, newly svelte, and some weary turtles from the fifth-rate aquarium kept in the Commerce Department basement were enlisted to stave off the budget knife for their respective interests, the arts...
Michener has necessarily compressed much of that history into an almost biblical form, begetting his own intertwining generations of English, black and Afrikaner families-the Saltwoods, Nxuma-los and Van Dooms. He describes the public politeness and private ruthlessness, the arranged frontier marriages-homely Dutch orphan girls shipped out to lonely farmers-and the Afrikaners' thousand torments, among them, the first modern concentration camps, set up by the British during the Boer War. Michener reconstructs that war, and its scenes of tenacity and loathing. Says one Afrikaner, summing up the lessons learned in that conflict: "When you are twelve...
...that has got-up and gone so many times over the season at just the wrong times. Who knows? Maybe they'll find inspiration in the neon lights of Broadway; maybe they'll come back ready to take on the world of hoop intercollegiate competition, just like little orphan Annie and her vacuous stare takes on the big, bad world: maybe they'll be swishing to the sounds of Broadway like the Harlem Globetrotters and their Sweet Georgia Brown...