Word: sagas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This time, Erdrich goes to the sources of her saga's bloodlines. Nanapush, a Chippewa elder born in 1862, begins with a stark account of an epidemic that devastated his people during the winter of 1912. "Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken," he laments. Pauline Puyat, born around the turn of the century, picks up the pace with a fanciful tale about one of the survivors, Fleur Pillager, a young girl | who grows to inhabit the book as the central symbol of endurance and revenge. Fleur...
Though not as sick as the S and L business, the commercial-banking industry has major difficulties all its own. Chief among them is the seemingly never ending saga of Third World debt. The ten largest banks have more than $50 billion on loan to developing countries. This sum amounts to roughly 100% of their shareholders' equity; if all the loans went into default, the banks' capital would be wiped...
Sooner or later, I realized that Atlanta, which has always been preoccupied with its image, can view almost any event as just another opportunity to shine. Even General Sherman's burning of Atlanta has been a matter of pride, central to the saga of a great city rising from the ashes, although Sherman did not exactly "burn Atlanta." He did destroy whatever was of value to the Confederate war effort, but, according to Franklin Garrett, the city's official historian, Atlanta suffered less damage during the war than Columbia, S.C., or Richmond, Va. When was the last time you heard...
...terrible story. Many embraced it. They even luxuriated in the outrage of it. The saga was extravagantly awful. Brawley is black and at the time of her disappearance was 15 years old. The old story: strange fruit hanging from a poplar tree, the night riders in sheets come North now. Was hers not the primal American tale of violated black innocence, of white bigotry that wears a badge and goes unpunished? Did it not reverberate with all the horrors of America's original sin? Did it not recapitulate, precisely, the original drama of abduction and violation that brought black Africans...
Never mind that many versions of this saga contradicted one another and the facts of the matter; they were invariably pithy and memorable. Donaldson's determination to set the record straight leads him to a repudiation of Cheever's freewheeling manner. Cliches seem to certify sober, scholarly research: "Life was not all fun and games, however" . . . "The New Yorker's taste was genteel, and as time wore on Cheever wrote about everything under the sun" . . . "Fred was the apple of his father...