Word: ashe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Timothy Garton Ash, a Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, reconstructing one's past involves a "continuous remixing of memory and forgetting." For much of 1980, while working on a doctorate in history, Garton Ash lived in East Berlin. Inevitably, he became an object of interest to East Germany's omnipresent secret police, known by the acronym Stasi. In The File (Random House; 262 pages; $23), Garton Ash, now 42, tries to reconstruct that year behind Berlin's Wall by comparing his private notes from the period with what he found in Stasi's newly opened records. Going further...
...Stasi had 90,000 full-time employees and 170,000 "unofficial collaborators"--which meant that roughly 1 out of every 50 adult East Germans was linked to the secret police. As Garton Ash learned, they included professors and acquaintances as well as police pros. Evading Stasi's embrace was not easy, since informers were played by their agency controls "like a fish on a line." These spies, the author concludes, were motivated less by malice than by human weakness and by an "almost infinite capacity for self-deception...
What happens when the siren sounds too late is evidenced by six mounds of freshly tilled soil adorned by simple wreaths. The graves contain the charred remains of local residents who perished on June 25, when the Soufriere Hills volcano spewed 150-m.p.h. molten rivers of lava, gas and ash down its flanks onto the villages below. As farmers tended to their carrot and cabbage fields, huge rocks showered on them and the scorching lava raced over the scalded ground. Ash-filled smoke plunged the land into darkness. There was nowhere to run. Nineteen people died, buried under tons...
Montserrat residents who stubbornly refuse to go are living in appalling conditions. Two-thirds of the island lies under a blanket of ash. Just a couple of restaurants and one gas station still function, and the hospital, now housed in a school, cannot care for the seriously ill. Nearly 1,500 people are consigned to the shelters that occupy every remaining church and school. At Gerald's Park, small children and adults are crowded in, 30 to a tent. In some shelters, there is one toilet for 50 people...
Thomas A. Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and the latter's son Russell motored into Plymouth [Vt.] and stopped at the Coolidge farmhouse. The President took them through the local cheese factory, of which his father is part owner, and gave Mr. Ford a sap bucket of pine with ash hoops, capacity 16 quarts, which had been made for and used by John Coolidge, a great-great-grandfather of the President, who died in 1822. Everybody's picture was taken... In a thunderstorm, lightning struck near the Coolidge farmhouse. It got into the headlines... The President at one time...