Word: tragic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...even people who know almost nothing about Eminem are aware that he and his mother are not close, you prepare for the worst. But rather than self-pitying, the tale of how Mom launched her misbehaving son's drug problems by dosing him with Valium turns out to be tragic, squirm-inducing and funny: "All right, Ma, you win, I don't feel like arguin'/ I'll do it, pop and gobble it and start wobbling/ Stumble, hobble, tumble, slip, drip, then I fall in bed/ With a bottle of meds." It goes without saying that "My Mom" and "Insane...
...Their son Christopher has written a memoir of that difficult year titled Losing Mum and Pup (Twelve; 251 pages). Christopher--as we will call him to avoid muddling our Buckleys--is best known as a comic novelist (Thank You for Smoking, Supreme Courtship), and in taking on such a tragic, personal subject, he's punching well above his weight class. But his sense of the absurd turns out to be oddly well suited to observing the numerous medical and existential indignities associated with dying, as well as to describing the bizarre, outsize creatures who raised...
...After resigning her position as English-department head at a London college, U.A. Fanthorpe, 79, an acclaimed British poet, took a receptionist job at a neurological hospital, where she witnessed tragic stories that incited her to start writing verse...
...time a Chinese leader of such stature - as head of the party, Zhao was nominally China's highest-ranking official - has spoken frankly about life at the top. Most significantly, Zhao's account could encourage future Chinese leaders to revisit the events of Tiananmen and acknowledge the government's tragic mistakes there. Hundreds of people were killed or imprisoned by government forces, though few Chinese today know the full story...
...into unruly lewdness when he does; Angela, a student at the local college, clings pathetically to her ever-elusive professor and lover Stuart, while he, in turn, struggles with his writing. As their lives intersect—at times in unexpected ways—the book evokes the particularly tragic chaos of suburban existence in which adults, unwilling and untethered, slowly slide away from the vision of a happy life. It’s a reluctance to surrender these individual visions that fuels the collective fascination with one another’s failures. Suburban desperation is no new project...