Word: squalor
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...Melrose Park, a working-class suburb of modest but tidy homes, live Donald and Stephanie Sled. This summer they packed up their few belongings and moved out of Chicago's westside ghetto, delighted to have found an affordable apartment in Melrose Park. In their excitement to escape the squalor and fear of the ghetto, the Sleds gave little thought to what it might mean to be the first black family in their neighborhood. "This was like heaven," recalls Donald, a 44-year-old handyman who sometimes stutters when excited. "It was so quiet and peaceful." But the Sleds have found...
...author grows enamored of a teaching fellow and confides to his journal: "Lonely and with my loneliness exacerbated by travel, motel rooms, bad food, public readings and the superficiality of standing in reception lines, I fell in love with Max in a motel room of unusual squalor." Near the end of his life, Cheever, ill with cancer, appears along with John Updike on The Dick Cavett Show. Donaldson carefully paraphrases Cheever's critique of himself after viewing the broadcast: "He looked like a viper trying to break wind, he wrote Updike...
...search for Salinger leads him into the author's fiction, where he finds autobiographical inspiration. The city and suburban settings of Nine Stories reflect Salinger's Manhattan youth and his adult stint among the commuters of Westport, Conn. The soldier in the magical For Esme -- with Love and Squalor suffers from a case of nerves not unlike the symptoms Salinger described in a letter to Hemingway. Models are identified for members of the Glass family, the precocious and haunting characters who ride the time loops of stories as early as A Perfect Day for Bananafish and as late as Seymour...
...fool." Especially when your roads lead way off the beaten track. Morris is not one for a luxury cruise. Instead she opts for danger and discomfort. Nothing to Declare is a memoir of her travels in Central America, which she explores in the tradition of truth through squalor, using a Mexican slum as a base camp. Despite occasional lapses into over- studied eloquence, she is a fascinating guide, with an eye for the brutal, the garish, the silly and bizarre. At a Mayan market in the Yucatan, Morris is tempted by giant beetles being sold as pets. "They were dressed...
Babbitt studied geology at Notre Dame and as a Marshall scholar in England. On a field trip to Bolivia, however, he got his first look at Third World poverty and experienced an epiphany. "I was doing fascinating research, but meanwhile we were surrounded by this incredible squalor," Babbitt says. Suddenly rocks seemed unimportant...