Word: willa
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BENEATH A BLUE UMBRELLA by Jack Prelutsky (Greenwillow; $15.95). The poet laureate of childhood has found his ideal illustrator in Garth Williams. Here are enough amusement and instruction to last a lifetime. Sample: "I had a little secret/ that I could not wait to tell,/ I whispered it to Willa,/ who repeated it to Nell./ Nell had to tell Belinda,/ who told Laura and Lenore,/ I think my little secret/ is no secret anymore...
Women like Celie and Sethe triumph over tremendous odds because they are able to reach deep down inside themselves and find their own strength. Isn't that quality what forms the backbone of such classics as Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or Willa Cather's My Antonia...
Gays have long gossiped about which public figures of past and present might be secret homosexuals. Publications from the scholarly to the semi-scabrous have speculated about the likes of Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, Willa Cather and James Dean, with hundreds of others cited along the way. This name dropping is defended as a way of giving the gay community role models and a sense of continuity. When the rumors involve living people, however, discussion about who is "in the closet" has generally been held to a discreet murmur -- partly in deference to libel laws but mostly in defense...
...implications go far beyond the bedroom or the wedding chapel. For it is only recently, and only in America, I believe, that love has come to be seen as a social and economic soporific, a kind of Quaalude to the energies of career, politics and other achievement. And Willa Cather, I believe, was very wrong in describing what she called "that secondary social man, the lover." Rather it seems to me that the love of a single person--passionate, devoted, consuming, honoring...human--is the fuel that drives and deepens all other social passions and commitments, which connects...
...Willa F.H. Berghuis...