Word: garton
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...Timothy Garton Ash, a Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, reconstructing one's past involves a "continuous remixing of memory and forgetting." For much of 1980, while working on a doctorate in history, Garton Ash lived in East Berlin. Inevitably, he became an object of interest to East Germany's omnipresent secret police, known by the acronym Stasi. In The File (Random House; 262 pages; $23), Garton Ash, now 42, tries to reconstruct that year behind Berlin's Wall by comparing his private notes from the period with what he found in Stasi's newly opened records. Going further...
...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...
...pain caused by economic and political transformation. Five years of double- and sometimes triple-digit inflation wiped out savings, privatization eliminated jobs, the collapse of the police state allowed crime to flourish, and cash-strapped governments cut back on social services. "Conspicuous consumption," says Oxford University's Timothy Garton Ash, has coincided with "conspicuous immiserization...
Foreign organisms have invaded the Great Lakes before, but few have engendered such apprehension. "The zebra mussel is a keystone species," says zoologist David Garton of Ohio State University. "It has the power to restructure the entire ecological community." The zebra mussel can strip water of algae and other microscopic plants and thus endanger animal life. Native clams are beginning to die off, victims of the zebra mussels' habit of attaching to clamshells in such numbers that they cannot open...
...scant months since those monumental events, Timothy Garton Ash has produced a work which brings out the best aspects of all three genres. The Magic Lantern is at once sensational, scholarly and literary...