Word: firsthand
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Though Wynd obviously should know Japan at firsthand, Black Fountains reads as though it might have been written in a U.S. public library. The characters are stock and wooden, fitted out with set speeches: Heroine Omi with her U.S. education, her once-liberal parents who have swallowed the new Japanese nationalist ideology, the old housekeeper turned spy. Wynd also spells out a message: there are lots of good Japanese but they cannot effectively buck the bad ones. Says Heroine Omi: "God grant that the Americans see this! . . . This country has to be cleaned. We haven't the strength...
Today, most citizens of the English-speaking world would feel that Bab was cheap at the price. They might also feel that without this firsthand experience of Italian opera bouffe at an impressionable age, Gilbert would never have furnished his famed librettos* with some of their most striking characteristics, e.g., the plausible ruffians and harried nursemaids, the wacky plots that hinge on babies stolen and strayed, the identities lost in enigmas and found through...
...firsthand experience of war, which Ernest Hemingway has called indispensable to the greatest writers, awaited Tolstoy at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. He commanded a battery of guns at the Fourth Bastion, most exposed point in the city's defenses. Tolstoy wrote the first of his Sevastopol Sketches in a dugout under bombardment. At first he liked the whole thing: "The constant charm of danger, observing the soldiers . . . are so agreeable that I do not wish to leave here. . . ." But before the siege was over he changed his mind. Though he hated physical violence, he beat...
Whatever became of the Luxembourg fleas, correspondents had firsthand evidence of their presence...
...local knowledge of the Near East shown in several of Agatha Christie's thrillers (Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile) was acquired at firsthand, as her first travel book now proves. It is a breezy, completely unsinister tale of a couple of winters she spent before the war in Syria, where her husband, Archaeologist Max Mallowan of the British Museum, went...