Word: britishisms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...whose primary weapons are subliminal music, disarming hugs and symbols of peace (like baby lambs). In 1979, a lieut. colonel in the U.S. Army named Jim Channon imagined just that, and wrote his ideas down in a 125-page confidential report called "The First Earth Battalion." Thirty years later, British journalist Jon Ronson explored the legacy of Channon's New Age manual and the U.S. military's surprising - and often sinister - enthusiasm for supernatural warfare in his 2004 book, The Men Who Stare at Goats. TIME spoke with Ronson about turning his book into a Hollywood film...
...think [the U.S. military] deliberately disseminated it to make torture seem funny. I think they saw an opportunity and went with it. That's exactly the kind of thing that psyops [Psychological Operations] does and I think everybody fell for it. And not just the American media, but the British media. The newspaper I work for, which is the Guardian - it's a very left-wing paper - was running funny stories about Barney torture. Everybody was. Until Abu Ghraib came along, it was just treated that...
Most of the new sources are letters and journals written by soldiers, and they yield hundreds of shockingly vivid vignettes from the beaches and trenches. You won't soon forget the account of Bill Millin, bagpiper for the 1st Special Service Brigade of the British Army, who had to march out of the surf onto Sword Beach under rifle and mortar fire playing "Highland Laddie." And Beevor focuses on things other writers have neglected. For example, he doesn't gloss over the hideous costs paid by French civilians. The Allies, before liberating them, bombed them relentlessly in an attempt...
Beevor is a skillful guide through the complex jockeying for position, sketching thumbnail portraits of the senior officers with novelistic abandon. (Of the senior British commander, the exasperating Sir Bernard Montgomery, he writes, "His self-regard was almost comical.") He is willing to be graphic, though never gratuitously so, in his descriptions of battle. Maybe the most horrific weapon on the battlefield was the white phosphorus the Allies carried. During the bitter fighting for Hill 112, an English soldier tried to slip through barbed wire under machine-gun fire. A round clipped a phosphorus grenade in his pouch and ignited...
...unclear what Harvard students will do for the time being until 15 Dunster St. reopens in the spring. As Herrell's storefront announces, the space promises to reopen in "early spring 2010" as "First Printer Restaurant, Bar, and Grill," commemorating Stephen Daye's first printing press in the British Americas, back in 1638. As a hat tip to Herrell's well-established customer base, First Printer has promised to have "frozen desserts" on its menu...