Word: suburbia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...parents gave him. His father Wally was raised a farmer, but when the family's ancestral acreage was taken to help expand the Pittsburgh, Pa., airport, Wally dropped out of mainstream agriculture and moved with his wife Deirdre, a graduate student in philosophy and a restless child of Delaware suburbia, to the West Virginia hamlet of Chloe. Alongside what Purdy estimates were a few hundred other local neohomesteaders, the family grew its own tomatoes, slaughtered its own cattle, and kept in touch with the wider world almost solely through National Public Radio. "Those utterly sober, almost somnolent male voices always...
...Burnham (Kevin Spacey) hates his job and the cubicle to which it confines him. He has also come to despise his tense and frigid wife Carolyn (Annette Bening), to mourn the sullen silence that has descended between him and his teenage daughter Jane (Thora Birch), to loathe the sterile suburbia where they all try to make emotional ends meet. Lester masturbates a lot, especially when he gets to thinking about his daughter's friend Angela (Mena Suvari), the American Beauty of the title...
...stuff of a full-size van hidden under the hood of a minivan--arrived when our son turned six. It turned me into a soccer dad, ferrying him and countless of his friends to school and Little League and all the other appointed rounds of the busy childhood of suburbia (for me, a wondrous place filled with not the wail of ER sirens but the music of kids' bicycle horns...
...Burnett, advertising genius --Willis Carrier, maker of air-conditioning systems --Walt Disney, creator of animation and multimedia empire --Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Co. --Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft --A.P. Giannini, architect of nationwide banking --Ray Kroc, hamburger meister --Estee Lauder, cosmetics tycoon --William Levitt, creator of suburbia --Lucky Luciano, criminal mastermind --Louis B. Mayer, Hollywood mogul --Charles Merrill, advocate of the small investor --Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony --Walter Reuther, labor leader --Pete Rozelle, football-league commissioner --David Sarnoff, father of broadcasting --Juan Trippe, aviation entrepreneur --Sam Walton, Wal-Mart dynamo --Thomas Watson Jr., IBM president...
...Lawns lost their romantic associations with English manor living years ago. The concept of the lawn is now a thoroughly American one and one thoroughly devoid of romance. A mental image of suburbia literally couldn't exist without the lawn (and the fat balding man standing around in his boxers, watering it with a flaccid garden hose, but more on that later) --suburbs were in fact designed around lawns. Jenkins describes the flight to suburbia and the ascendancy of the single-family home with front yard as "the most characteristic single feature of European settlement in North America...