Word: piousness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pair of 14-year-old identical twins, Leah and Adah, are the author's most vivid characters. Leah is a thoughtful, idealistic beauty who at first idolizes her father, then sees through his pious bluster. Adah, crippled at birth, is a wry, inward-turning genius who refuses to speak but silently reshapes the world in bitter palindromes: "amen enema," and "evil, all; its sin is still alive...
Gaudi was obsessively pious, especially in his old age. He used to shuffle around the streets of his city nibbling on crusts of bread and seeking alms for the building of the Sagrada Famolia. He hated liberalism and was devoted to everything most penitential and reactionary in Spanish Catholicism. He was gloomy, short-fused, arrogant--the Christian virtue of humility was never his forte--and so misogynistic that he never married and probably died a virgin. Of course, such traits have never disqualified anyone from sainthood, and nobody would doubt that Gaudi was in a general way a more saintly...
...more fun--as always in Waters' genially transgressive movies--are the rich portrayals of his fellow Baltimoreans, among them Christina Ricci's Laundromat Nazi, Mary Kay Place's fashion-forward thrift-shop owner and Jean Schertler's goofy grandma using a statue of the Virgin Mary to practice some pious ventriloquism. Check...
...know why. When Christoph sailed for America, he changed his last name back to Jardin and, with Emma, raised a new family that would include my grandmother, Matilda Jardin Blackman. A pious, churchgoing Mason by the time he reached his 40s, Christoph never told my father's family that he had left a child in Hawaii--or that Alexander was, in fact, his flesh and blood...
Like the U.S. in which he prospered for so long, from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression, Rockefeller was an organism of some contradiction: his idealism and his rapacity, the good John D. and his evil twin, went partners with each other. The deeply pious Baptist Sunday-school teacher would work the rest of the week as a corporate Borgia--the worst of the "malefactors of great wealth," according to Teddy Roosevelt. In his parallel universe of philanthropy, the lipless, squinty skinflint would dispense hundreds of millions of dollars, which among many other things built the University of Chicago...