Word: parental
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...passenger was Jacob F. (Jake) Horton, 57, a Gulf Power vice president who had hastily arranged to fly to Atlanta, headquarters of Southern Co., the utility's corporate parent. Since last year a federal grand jury in Atlanta has been looking into suspicious accounting practices in the spare-parts department at Southern Co., but the inquiry has grown into a broad investigation of alleged tax fraud and graft at the utility and its subsidiaries, including Gulf Power. On the day of the crash, Horton was told by Gulf Power officials that an internal auditing group had recommended his dismissal after...
This is never an easy question (autobiographies frequently contain more fancy than novels), but so far as one needs a guide to the free state of Theroux's imagination, it is this: like the author, the novel's hero, Andrew (sometimes Andre) Parent, was born and reared in Massachusetts, spent a good part of the '60s teaching and traveling in the Third World, and eventually made his mark as a London-based writer...
Beyond that, Theroux's randy adventurer has a convincing, if not necessarily reassuring, reality of his own. Parent is a droll reminder that nature adores deception. His admission that "in order to be strong I needed to have secrets" sounds no more or no less deceitful than the call of any unhousebroken creature who relies on stealth to catch a meal, a mate or juicy material for a novel...
...Parent's secrets are mainly sexual, a subject that arouses an immediate interest but can be hard to sustain for 500 pages. Happily, Theroux's hero is a man of ironic intelligence and amusing self-awareness. He believes that comedy is the "highest expression of truth" and, conversely, that the funniest things are frequently the truest. This makes for considerable humor arising from grim situations. Moreover, Parent's wanderlust means a frequent change of scenery and a liberating sense that, as the playwright Tom Stoppard put it, every exit is an entrance somewhere else...
Result: Williams, 37, became the first parent arrested under the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act, a six-month-old California law that compels parents to supervise and control their children or be charged with contributing to delinquency. Williams, free on $20,000 bail and denying guilt, faces a possible year in jail and $2,500 fine...