Word: sagas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Last week Manes' political saga came to an abrupt end. He was in the kitchen of his Tudor-style home in tony Jamaica Estates, talking on the telephone with his psychiatrist about committing himself to a mental hospital. Increasingly despondent, the 52-year-old politician suddenly began rummaging through a drawer, pulled out an eight-inch knife and plunged it into his heart. His wife Marlene found him slumping to the floor moments later and pulled the blade from his chest, but he was dead in minutes. There was no suicide note; explanations were unnecessary. Federal prosecutors seemed poised...
...ingredients were here for a B-Western version of the saga of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Cyra's first home was the midnight blue 1937 Packard that carried her parents from one raucous engagement to the next: "By my third birthday, I had logged 150,000 miles, occasion for an AP wirephoto captioned: 'She Sees America.' " She also witnessed an endless string of saloons and her parents' behavior in them: "Pat was a two-fisted drinker. Cy was a drunk, charming and good-humored when sober, combative and cold-eyed when drunk." Liquor fueled fights between them, as did their...
...Njal's Saga, known to every schoolchild, the hero is burned to death, and it falls to his son-in-law Kari to avenge the family. Coldly, he knocks off 15 of his enemies, but then suddenly the killing stops. He feels he has overdone it. He asks the pardon of his chief antagonist, and stability is restored. As it is in Hrafnkel's Saga, where, after the obligatory killings and counterkillings, the hero refuses to execute his archrival and chooses to re-establish the balance in the country...
Only in Grettir's Saga are the themes of equilibrium and balance absent. Grettir is a law unto himself. Taking on everyone alone, he finally chooses death over the safety of the world...
Sayer's jazz drummer father, Gerry, and Betty, her frazzled mother, are bottle buddies who happen to have three small children. When her parents split, Sayer's freewheeling childhood descends into a grim saga: she moves from suburb to suburb, school to school, always at the mercy of Betty's genius for sabotaging her own security and picking up the wrong bloke at the pub. Amid this culture of poverty, mental illness, domestic violence, alcoholism and fear, Sayer blossoms. She finds ways to escape the misery, if only in bursts, through poetry, martial arts and music. Friends drop...