It's easier to care about the pleasures and miseries of life in a failing gator park when we know how the father (the self-proclaimed Chief Bigtree) and his family ended up there, and are led to understand what goes into the routine of putting on death-defying shows every day.
His determination to defy expectations shows up in everything from idiosyncratic punctuation to personal risk-taking to the near-random order in which the book's photographs appear.
He defied convention, showing an anti-establishment streak that would remain consistent throughout his life.
Rather, they are an account of a life that defied hierarchy, showing what it took to do so: what was lost, what was left.
(Seriously, I defy any show-watcher to sit quietly, under the influence of a single beer, and not, at the very least, bop your head along with the beat).
The Rams won it all last season with offense as the show, defying longtime league logic that defense wins titles.
Business confidence in Germany rose in November for the first time since April, a closely watched survey showed, defying analysts' expectations for Europe's largest economy.
In a season when the Hollywood gene pool teems with fresh specimens, some familiar faces are shaking things up, defying stereotypes — and showing those newbies how it's done.
Libya's former interim prime minister Mahmoud Jibril has won a landslide victory in the country's first democratic election, early figures show, defying expectations that the Muslim Brotherhood would sweep to power.
Inside the canvas canopy, the fashion-aerialists are putting on their big show, defying gravity, while outside on the sidewalk the echoes of fashions long past and almost forgotten can still be heard.
Defying expectations, Haldane showed that strings of fermions and bosons behave very differently.
