Word: whitely
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wealth. The son of immigrant servants, he was informally adopted by his parents' millionaire employer, raised as a gentleman and sent off to Harvard. In his early 60s, after an on-and-off career in Government service, he finds himself buried in an obscure job with the Nixon White House. So remote is his office that it becomes the perfect hiding place for a trunk containing a million dollars in unlaundered bills. Starbuck is sent off to a minimum-security prison in Georgia, the least heralded co-conspirator in all of Watergate. He muses later: "It was like being...
...only fixed points to steer by but fetishes that protect a writer from foundering in swamps of detail. Edward Hoagland does not get around to his ritual reference until page 91 of African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan: "Far from learning something new about the black-white torque that is such a misery in America, here I was freer of it. But the other reason why I had come to Africa, instead of to another southern continent, was that on the contrary, it was not a clean slate, not neutral ground. The myth of blackness, darkness, this 'land...
...hears the din in Khartoum where the Blue and the White Niles meet and in a southern Sudan sapped to a "hopeless torpor" by epidemic. The specific character and hardship of a place are conveyed with arresting brevity. On the hard desert of the Muslim north: "It depressed me to see the starved, tethered donkeys outside suffering while the fat ones ate, and the thirsty chickens dashing for a chance to peck at our spit." In the river town of Gelhak he records the visual cacophony in Polaroid prose: "We saw a man with a monkey's nose...
...speaking fluent Arabic. By contrast, Hoagland drifts in and out of stagnant backwaters, a rumpled, skinny fugitive from L.L. Bean whose spoken English is hampered by a bad stutter. He is as puzzling and exotic to his hosts as they are to him, one of a long line of white hunters and note takers whom the wags of Juba on the White Nile call pink spiders. Only this one writes a blue streak...
...Living End, Stanley Elkin NONFICTION: Blood of Spain, Ronald Fraser ∙I Love: The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik, Ann and Samuel Charters ∙The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff ∙The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas ∙The Neoconservatives, Peter Steinfels ∙The White Album, Joan Didion ∙When Memory Comes, Saul Friedlander