Word: orphaning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...person who witnesses and reports all this is Daniel Quinn, an orphan approaching his 15th birthday who works for the roguish John the Brawn. This night is the making of Quinn and his book, for it is then that he falls helplessly in love with Maud and launches himself on the adventures that he will gradually learn to capture in words. "Quinn," he asks himself at one point, "when will you become wise, or even smart?" Quinn's Book provides the answer...
...Superman was a reassuring hero for troubled times, for the Depression and the coming World War, why has he endured so long? Partly because troubled times have endured in other forms, and partly because he has always had qualities that go beyond the flying fists. He was orphaned, and thus forced to rely on himself, just like Little Orphan Annie or Huck Finn. He is a foreigner from outer space in a land built by foreigners. And he is one of the good guys, fighting for "truth, justice and the American way," which seems to many people a very good...
...like a fairy tale for feminist preteens -- Ms. Nancy Drew. Like Polly, Writer-Director Patricia Rozema works entirely too hard to be ingratiating; her picture is a desperate audition for endearment. Falling in love with Mermaids, as many viewers will, is akin to feeding the homeless or adopting an orphan puppy: an act of humane surrender...
...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...
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...