Word: rootlessness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...criminal), barely educated by a British schoolmaster who thought that "all micks was a notch beneath the cattle." Like most criminals, Ned believes he is innocent, that whatever wrongs he committed were acts of self-defense against an unjust society bent on crushing him and all like him, the rootless poor robbed of their past. "That is the agony of the Great Transportation," he muses, "that our parents would rather forget what come before so we currency lads is left alone ignorant as tadpoles spawned in puddles on the moon...
...begin a search. Within six months our caseworker, Kim Matsunaga, told us they had found the birth mother but she was highly reluctant to meet us. She had never told anyone about Rae. In Korea, the shame of unwed pregnancy is huge. The mother is disowned, the baby rootless. Kim guessed she had told her parents she was moving to the city to work and had gone to a home for unwed mothers...
More concerned with plot than pathos, Brown presents his characters without judgment or sentiment, a courtesy he extended to all the luckless, hard-drinking, rootless denizens of his previous work. On the strength of his bleak, intimately detailed portraits of blue-collar Mississippians, and his insistence on setting his stories in and around his hometown (a region fictionalized by William Faulkner as Yoknapatawpha County), Brown is being celebrated as a new voice of the South, or, as he's also been dubbed, one of the "bad boys" of Southern literature...
...mysteries of Caravaggio's inventive, rootless and miserably destructive life quickly pull the reader into this biography, which reads as much like a Simenon detective tale as it does the deeply researched work of art history that it is. Even the painter's name is up for grabs, reduced here to M (it's worth reading the book to find out why). One thing is not mysterious: painting was irrevocably changed by the drama and limpid sexuality of Caravaggio's pictures--boys with eyes of precocious longing, fruit heavy with a ripeness so perfect as to be forbidden even...