Word: sisterly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...stories are set in sub-Saharan Africa--Rwanda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya. Akpan's method is to present scenes of extreme violence and degradation from a child's point of view. A young boy watches his sister practice prostitution; a man sells his niece and nephew into slavery; a girl looks on as her Tutsi father kills her Hutu mother with a machete. And so on. These stories are so frightening and upsetting, and offer so little in the way of closure or consolation, that you wonder what the point is of subjecting yourself to them--they exist at the border...
...contrast, it took only a few hours to catch the killer in Kathryn Harrison's While They Slept (Random House; 290 pages). Early on the morning of April 27, 1984, Billy Frank Gilley Jr., then 18, beat his parents and his sister Becky to death with a baseball bat in their home in Oregon. He said afterward that he did it to save himself and his other sister Jody from an abusive domestic situation. He imagined that they would run away together. Jody called...
This story fascinated Harrison for years before she tracked down Billy (still in prison) and Jody (now a successful businesswoman) and interviewed them. Billy's quasi-incestuous interest in his sister echoes an episode of incest in Harrison's life. "I find [their story] has a forbidden, sexual charge," she writes. "Because love, murder and running away together do imply sex. They do suggest an illicit erotic fixation." There's something very creepy about her interest in the Gilley murders that is difficult for the reader to make peace with--she is not just a clarifying, interpreting narrator; she also...
...ever jealous of your sister Amy? Dan Burhans DES MOINES, IOWA...
...Sunday, June 1, you can see Tony Blair on our sister network cnn as the first guest on the new international-affairs show Fareed Zakaria--gps, airing at 1 p.m. E.T. and also around the world on cnn International