Word: rootlessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...horror was too great to catch and hold with words, but a Welsh poet named Jeuan Gethin set down some measure of it: "We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance . . . It is seething, terrible, wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried under the arms, a painful angry knob . . . " The phantom he described was bubonic plague, the Black Death that reached Sicily from the East in 1347 and within three years...
...sure, many of the symptoms of unhappiness in Brevard County can be found in any U.S. executive suburb. Countless families also manage to cope successfully with the rootless life of the space technician, just as thousands managed to surmount the pressures and temptations of boom towns in World War II. Yet the turmoil in some Brevard County homes is so corrosive that Dr. Ben Storey, a general practitioner in Titusville, reports that he finds one new case of ulcers every week in adolescents that he sees. He has even discovered one case in a 2½-year-old child. Considering...
...Rootless Childhood. The "Loner" title was corny but appropriate. McKuen has led his life mostly apart from others. He was born into the Depression in a Salvation Army hospital in Oakland, Calif., shortly after his father had deserted the family. His mother worked as a waitress, a telephone operator and a dime-a-dance hostess until her marriage to a "cat-skinner"-the operator of Caterpillar tractors on Government road projects. McKuen was hauled from one construction site to another throughout the West and Northwest until, at age eleven, he split from his family and spent four years drifting...
BULLET PARK, by John Cheever. In his usual setting of uncomfortably comfortable suburbia, Cheever stages the struggle of two men-one mild and monogamous, the other rootless and haunted-over the fate...
...contrast, Paul Hammer, Nailles' fated counterpart, is literally a bastard. "There is some mysterious, genetic principality," Cheever observes, "where the children of anarchy and change are raised." Hammer carries the passport of that principality. Brought up as a foundling, he becomes an unsettling, sinister figure. Rootless and rich, he is odd in some dreadful way that puts him outside humanity. A haunted, solitary drunk, he seems to epitomize the danger and disorder that lurk in self-preoccupation. A pet cat, or familiar spirit, called Schwartz, suggests that Hammer may be some sort of warlock. But in any case, Hammer...