Word: authors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...basket. And second, anyone who thinks that about most of the places covered in Ghost Train is clearly not paying attention. The Cambodians, the Vietnamese, the Russians, the Indians - their world is "worsening?" Compared to 30 years ago? If Theroux actually believes that, it tells us more about the author, 30 years on, than the places he has visited...
...autonomy. It was the new Georgian government that unilaterally revoked this autonomous status. So, at a moment of crisis, what should Russia have done but come to the rescue of its people (although in military terms the way it was done was definitely disproportionate)? I wonder what the author thinks about the "solution" of the Kosovo crisis forced on Serbia by the "international community," or the equally forceful Palestinian-Jewish "solution" in 1948 agreed on primarily by Western nations? I wonder if what many regard as a wrong done by the "international community" is worth less than a wrong done...
...there's also a disadvantage. The post-author approach gives The 39 Clues a synthetic, focus-grouped quality. It's nothing you can easily point to. It's just the absence of anything risky or anything strange. The Maze of Bones is scrupulously smooth and generic and meticulously calculated to appeal to everyone and offend no one. As the product of a corporate hivemind, it isn't stamped with the signature quirks of a single distinctive authorial sensibility. If it were a baby it wouldn't have a belly button...
...returned from Iraq last month, says there is "still a running gun battle with al-Qaeda in Iraq" in the northern part of the country around Mosul. U.S. troops there are "still in the 'clear' phase of 'clear, hold, build' counterinsurgency strategy," said Nagl, a West Point graduate and author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam who recently helped Petraeus rewrite the Army/Marine Corps' Counterinsurgency Field Manual. "There's still a fight going on up north, and we're going to have a fight there for awhile...
...Schroeder is the author of a recent study about how little German youngsters today actually know about the GDR. He and his colleagues surveyed over 5,000 students aged between 15 and 17, and found that many, especially those actually living in areas that formed part of East Germany, have an extremely distorted view of the GDR. More than half of the respondents, for example, believe that the GDR was "not a dictatorship," and that the Stasi was an intelligence service like any other, deployed mostly against people of other countries rather than against its own citizens. The figures...