Word: penniless
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...recalls in a spunky, bittersweet memoir called Angela's Ashes (Scribner; 364 pages; $24), his dad was both a kindly parent and a world-class rummy. Sober enough during the week, on paydays Malachy McCourt would guzzle away his wages at a pub and, late Friday night, stagger home, penniless. There, while his wife Angela wept and railed, he would coax his sons into singing old patriot tunes and roar that they must be ready to die for Ireland. Next morn, as oft as not, he would be too groggy for work. And thus was another job lost...
...Wigan is a place of impacted resentments on the part of the miners and supercilious contempt on the part of the clan that owns the mine workings, ruled by a righteous and merciless cleric, Bishop Hannay. Into this nexus of bitterness and coal dust comes Jonathan Blair, a penniless, malarial and more than slightly gin-sodden African explorer. Blair, who was born in Wigan, would rather be anywhere else, but the wealthy bishop, whose hobby is African exploration--this is the era of Burton, Speke and the Mountains of the Moon--has promised Blair a place on his next expedition...
...subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz to pay one of his victims $43 million for pain, suffering and punitive damages. Darrell Cabey, left paralyzed and brain damaged after being shot by Goetz in a Manhattan subway 12 years ago, will probably never see most of that money, as Goetz is practically penniless after paying for both his civil and criminal defense. Cabey was shot several times after he and three friends approached Goetz in the subway and asked him for five dollars. The men say they were simply panhandling, but Goetz testified that he feared he was about to be robbed. Jurors...
Ignatiev's heavily researched study goes beyond historicizing concepts of whiteness to locate their crystalization in the unique experience of Irish immigration. No other European ethnicity began so penniless, oppressed and spurned as the Irish Catholics did when they first arrived, or worked and languished in worse conditions. Irish considered themselves the blacks of Europe and black freedmen viewed themselves, according to some literature of the day, comfortably superior in position to that of the Irishman. Somewhere in the crucible of New England urban labor competition, the Irish forged a new white identity for themselves to ensure their place next...
Brancusi was born in 1876, in a small village in Romania. He completed a long and thorough training in sculpture in Bucharest before reaching Paris, almost penniless, in 1904. He even worked briefly as a studio menial for Auguste Rodin before quitting in the realization that, as he later put it, nothing grows under great trees. Throughout his life, legends stuck to Brancusi like burrs; he was apt to be seen as a peasant sage, a Carpathian exotic (to most Parisians, Romania barely qualified as part of Europe). And he seemed even more of an original to American collectors...