Word: garton
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Australia, once a penal colony, Valerie Garton, 61, warns that "one must never start family history unless you're willing to accept everything you find." Garton's great-grandfather was transported to Tasmania for stealing sheep. Only a few decades ago, it was considered a taboo Down Under to admit to convict ancestry, and early census records were destroyed by politicians and others who did not want their origins revealed. But lately it has become fashionable to be a first-fleet Australian. Likewise, in the new South Africa, nonwhite ancestry for an Afrikaner is not only politically correct but socially...
...Oxford historian, Garton Ash is the author of six books, including History of the Present, which will be published by Random House this fall...
Oxford historian and author Timothy Garton Ash wrote The Polish Revolution: Solidarity
...Stasi had 90,000 full-time employees and 170,000 "unofficial collaborators"--which meant that roughly 1 out of every 50 adult East Germans was linked to the secret police. As Garton Ash learned, they included professors and acquaintances as well as police pros. Evading Stasi's embrace was not easy, since informers were played by their agency controls "like a fish on a line." These spies, the author concludes, were motivated less by malice than by human weakness and by an "almost infinite capacity for self-deception...
...Garton Ash writes, "the temptation is always to pick and choose your past," since a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies: the very act of opening a door into one's personal history changes the artifacts buried inside. That observation applies as much to James Salter's stylish Burning the Days as to Garton Ash's sprightly The File...