Word: firsthand
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Inspired in part by the music they made, I put my fledgling career as a jazz saxophonist on hold and headed with my girlfriend to experience Havana firsthand. Before long I was playing with El Septeto Tipico de la Habana, a talented and remarkably underpaid group of musicians who played weeknights at la Casa de Amistad (The House of Friendship). The casa was a mansion that had been nationalized to become a cultural institute and was now hosting Puerto Rican socialists on solidarity junkets, Cuban black marketeers and bureaucrats, and the occasional stray tourist...
Their individual experiences eventually drove the two men apart. Benjamin was one of the most reluctant of the colonies' reluctant revolutionaries. But living for years in London as a colonial agent, he saw firsthand the artifice and chicanery of what he thought of as a corrupt regime. As a colonial Governor, William was subject to attacks by a legislature whose leaders seemed bent on sundering the ties that bound the ungrateful colonists to England. The Franklins were divided by a conflict that was as much a civil war as a war for independence, one in which brothers fought brothers...
...same time, Orwell might have doubted the wisdom of some current policies - the willingness to speckle the Islamic world with American garrisons or award contracts for the reconstruction of wrecked nations to favored companies. His loathing of imperialism was visceral, because he knew, firsthand, what it meant. In the 1920s Orwell had served in the imperial police in Burma, then a British colony, and the experience left him with an almost physical hatred for the behavior - in fact, the very language and look - of the imperialist class. Last week I reread Burmese Days, Orwell's 1934 novel based...
...NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL The best-selling, firsthand account of minimum-wage life...
...overcrowding the country's more prosperous cities. Officially, custody-and-repatriation (C.-and-R.) centers are responsible for detaining vagrants, beggars and those who lack permits to live in cities, and returning them to their hometowns. In reality, say human-rights experts and those who have experienced the system firsthand, it's a terrifyingly arbitrary and routinely abused tool of state power that, at its worst, amounts to little more than a police-enforced kidnapping-and-ransom scheme...