Word: boying
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Richard writes a preface to each section of the book but otherwise lets his father do the recollecting. A clay-poor Georgia farm boy, Dean Rusk tells with self-effacing charm how he hustled to get an education (Davidson and Oxford) and endured World War II service as an infantry staff officer. John Kennedy surprised Rusk, and most everyone else, by making him Secretary of State, and Lyndon Johnson kept him on. The cold war convinced Rusk that free nations must hang together in a nuclear age. So when Communist forces threatened South Vietnam, the Secretary saw no alternative...
...underestimated his son's patience. After five years of taping and editing, the Rusks still disagree over the war. But the father Richard allows to emerge from the minutiae of diplomacy is a role model for any boy: modest, confident, quietly effective and loyal to his bosses and his principles. "I won't be around for history's verdict," says Rusk, now 81 and ailing in his Georgia retirement, "and I am perfectly relaxed about...
...eyes of the masters: Vladimir Nabokov (White's literary hero) praised his first novel, and Gore Vidal hailed his second, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978). A book of nonfiction titled States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980) enjoyed encomiums from Christopher Isherwood. In reviewing A Boy's Own Story (1982), the New York Times said, "Edmund White has crossed . . . J.D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde to create an extraordinary novel...
...Boy's Own Story, a longtime big seller in both the U.S. and England, was the first of a projected tetralogy on gay life in modern America. The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) chronicles gay life through the liberated 1960s; if White lives long enough, he hopes to complete the series with novels about the frenzied bathhouse '70s and the plague-ridden '80s. In the meantime he is working on a biography of Jean Genet and teaching courses on the French playwright and on creative writing at Brown University. Although his semiautobiographical coming-out themes are staples of gay fiction...
...White III was born 50 years ago in Cincinnati to a father who was a chemical engineer and a mother who was a psychologist for retarded children. He is the seventh Valentine in the White descent. His older sister Margaret Fleming, a psychotherapist, recalls that even as a small boy her brother was different: "Like most kids I was a conformist, but not Ed. I didn't understand him then and probably tortured him a lot . . . Today he's my hero. When my parents divorced, he was only seven, and he took it very hard. He became a very lost...