Word: often
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Winsted, Conn., a gracious town of 8,000. His mother Rose used to ask friends all about films showing at the local movie house and would send her four children only to the few that had useful messages. Nightly dinner was more a course in forensics than food: it often lasted four or five hours, and everyone was expected to contribute his opinions to the topic of the evening. Nadra Nader, now 77, a Lebanese immigrant who built up a moderately prosperous restaurant business, presided over these Kennedy-like sessions, and he urged the children to stand up for their...
...lanky six-footer who is constantly behind schedule and late for appointments, Nader can be painfully shy among strangers. When asked to give his name in hotels and on planes, he often tries to avoid recognition and replies, "Nader, initial R." He even keeps his birthday secret lest admirers send him cakes or other gifts. His driving intensity about work can sometimes trap him into hasty accusations. When economists in the Johnson Administration once met with auto industry leaders in an effort to win voluntary price restraint, Nader was too quick to accuse the Administration of "acquiescing" to Detroit...
This chronicle is often retrieved from corniness by touching moments and memories that allow young Lahr to mold humanity around the trite-tragic skeleton that his father's life seems to have been. For instance, there is Lahr as a budding vaudevillian putting makeup on his collar even when unemployed so everyone will know he is in show biz. One is touched by the physical fact that his left wrist was permanently larger than the right from breaking repeated pratfalls. And a fine moment comes when a wino outside the theater holds out a dollar saying "Here, Bert...
...kidnaped four-year-old child, as well as a hunt for clues to his own early background, and the attempt to dekidnap himself and all his friends who have been stolen away from their childhood into an adopted adulthood. The excellent but dumfoundingly prolix result is an often funny, painfully intense psychological detective story filled with Double-Crostics, Nabokovian word games and revelations that tantalizingly obscure as much as they reveal...
...requires dedication and patience to follow the trail of Hind's windings and unwindings, though the reader's kidnaped hours are in the end handsomely ransomed. Along the way, it is often difficult to see de Forrest for the trees -even with, or from, what McElroy calls "Hind's height...