Word: orphan
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...second novel, the former Bad Boy of Tennis again displays an intimate knowledge of the international tournament scene and an insensitivity to the niceties of plot and narrative. This time out the protagonist, Istvan Horwat, is an East European champion who conquers Wimbledon and women until a little orphan forces him to abandon the Egomania Open. She is Natasha Kotany, the daughter of friends killed in a plane crash. Under Horwat's avuncular gaze, the girl blossoms into a beautiful woman and a court phenom. One night she astonishes him, if no one else, by inquiring, "Haven't you understood...
What does Art Buchwald have in common with Leo Tolstoy? Samuel Taylor Coleridge with Mary McCarthy? Not to mention Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist, Tarzan, Superman and Little Orphan Annie. Right: they all lost parents at an early age and had to confront the world more or less on their...
Eileen Simpson, who wrote Poets in Their Youth (1982), an admirable memoir of her marriage to the poet John Berryman, was an orphan too, but what she calls a "lucky one." Some luck. When she was eleven months old, her mother succumbed to tuberculosis; her father later put her and her older sister in a Catholic convent school, and she learned at the age of six that he had suddenly died of ptomaine poisoning. Convent life was benign but austere. Three winters in a row she suffered pneumonia so severe that a priest administered Extreme Unction...
...bones, of course; ivory vanishes quickly in East Africa. The elephant is three weeks dead. Poachers. Not far away, a baby elephant walks alone. That is unusual. Elephants are careful mothers and do not leave their young unattended. The skeleton is the mother, and the baby is an orphan...
Before Australia was Australia it was the antipodes, the opposite pole to civilization, an obscure and unimaginable place that was, literally, the end of the world. And before it became a nation, this orphan continent on which European history had left no mark at all became the site of a bizarre and dreadful social experiment. For almost a hundred years, beginning in 1788, it served as a human trash heap where England exiled some 160,000 members of its criminal class...