Word: parentes
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Campus social organizations excluded Italians, Jews and Blacks. Black students were barred from living in first-year dormitories. Lowell wrote to a parent of a Black student, "I am sure you will understand why, from the beginning, we have not thought it possible to compel men of different races to reside together...
...Parent's secrets are mainly sexual, a subject that arouses an immediate interest but can be hard to sustain for 500 pages. Happily, Theroux's hero is a man of ironic intelligence and amusing self-awareness. He believes that comedy is the "highest expression of truth" and, conversely, that the funniest things are frequently the truest. This makes for considerable humor arising from grim situations. Moreover, Parent's wanderlust means a frequent change of scenery and a liberating sense that, as the playwright Tom Stoppard put it, every exit is an entrance somewhere else...
...Young Parent can barely wait to break out of Medford, Mass., during the late '50s. Outwardly he appears to have been quite ordinary: an altar boy who liked to plink at bottles with his .22-cal Mossberg. Yet his mind has been jump-started by books, especially Dante's The Divine Comedy. "It was not just the blood and gore," he tells a friendly parish priest, "but that the people in Hell seemed real; the ones in Purgatory and Paradise were wordy and unbelievable...
...year-old Andy's passions are more prosaic. Having got his girlfriend pregnant, he is forced to borrow abortion money from a 50-year-old matron who has been trying to seduce him. Keeping one woman from knowing about the other foreshadows a more elaborate predicament in Parent's early middle...
What kind of mother would expect her 15-year-old daughter to jump off a tower while strapped with wings to prove that mankind can fly? What kind of daughter, after being cowed by such a mother, would so quake at the parent- child bond that she would abandon her toddler to relatives and head off to Europe to teach? What kind of child, growing up as the object of battle between such willful women, would prove at once fiercer and more forgiving than either...