Word: barbarian
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...when Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his black-hulled steam frigate Susquehanna into Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay) and "opened" Japan at gunpoint, after more than two centuries of self-imposed isolation, to American merchants and missionaries. Humiliated, the Japanese decided to modernize their feudal regime by imitating the barbarian invaders. They hired French officers to retrain their soldiers and British shipbuilders to create their navy. From the Germans they learned the secrets of modern science and from the Americans the secrets of modern commerce...
Three qualities elevate the book to the memorable. First, Katz knows TV, not just the details that lend verisimilitude but the mind-set and values. Any seasoned journalist is likely to identify with some incident and feel a twinge of shame. Second, rather than fulminate against barbarian interlopers, Katz is candid about the waste, carelessness and openly tolerated thievery that made their raids possible. The TV business, he says, was not businesslike. Third, Katz does not exploit the melodrama of the takeover. He largely ignores the boardroom fighting and has the actual bloodless coup take place off-page. His real...
...could hope for money, fame, power, love, brains and muscles? Only Arnold, as he is everywhere known. Just now he is the movies' top star, the one whose name above the title of a film -- Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, Predator, Twins, Total Recall or his new Kindergarten Cop -- guarantees that people will buy tickets or snatch up the videocassette. He didn't need a plastic surgeon or a movie-agent Mephistopheles to become Arnold; his eminence is a triumph of the will. Even if he weren't a celebrity, he would be richer than Webster; his shrewd entrepreneurship...
...happen. At the time, though, it was as hard to imagine him fitting into mainstream films as it would be to fit his wonderfully preposterous name on a movie marquee. Even after he scored a worldwide hit in his first starring role, as a primeval pillager in Conan the Barbarian, he was still seen as a fluke or a freak. Could this slab of sirloin beefcake act? It hardly mattered. He could fill the film frame superbly. He was also lucky. With the box-office triumph of Star Wars, Hollywood was back in the action- fantasy business. And with producers...
...Germanic tribes began moving into Roman territory during the 3rd century, not as the "barbarian" invaders of popular legend but as immigrants and refugees. Even the Visigoths, who conquered Rome in A.D. 410, subjecting it, in Gibbon's majestic words, to the "licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia," had originally entered the empire peacefully, and many had loyally served in the Roman army. The celebrated sacking of Rome was primarily a humiliation, nothing like the all-out Roman destruction of Carthage, Thebes and Jerusalem...