Word: wolffe
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...look forward with great anticipation to the moment when [President] Derek Bok attempts to explain in front of Archbishop Tutu why it is in Blacks' best interest not to divest," Robert P. Wolff '54, H/RAAA director, said this week. "I think the University's position will crumble at that moment...
THIS BOY'S LIFE by Tobias Wolff (Atlantic Monthly Press; $18.95). A vivid memoir of a bizarre upbringing, dwelling not on hardships but on the promise of awakening every morning in a vast land where people are prepared to forget the past and believe anything...
THIS BOY'S LIFE by Tobias Wolff (Atlantic Monthly Press; $18.95). This memoir by a highly praised author in his early 40s evokes the bizarre details of his upbringing, dwelling not on hardships but on the promise of awakening every morning in a vast land where people are prepared to forget the past and believe anything...
This Boy's Life proves good enough to be unforgettable. Tobias Wolff, 43, is the author of two collections of stories and The Barracks Thief (1984), a critically acclaimed novella. He is also the younger brother of Geoffrey Wolff, whose own memoir, The Duke of Deception (1979), introduced tens of thousands of readers to the bizarre saga of the Wolff family. Although these two narratives have kinship and blood in common, they spring from dissimilar circumstances. The parents split up when the brothers were young. Geoffrey stayed east with his flamboyantly fraudulent father; Tobias drifted west with his mother...
That is about as self-pitying as This Boy's Life ever gets. Wolff's main interest is not the harshness of his childhood but the strategies of survival he learns, tutored by domestic eccentricities and the promise of a vast land where memory is short and every morning promises a brand new life. Though separated by a continent, he remains his father's son, a princeling of deception: "I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others." Hence he adopts a name, Jack, that he feels suits him better than his real one. An indolent student...