Word: life
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...instructions on how to walk out of jail, go to Genoa and get on a ship bound for freedom. His adviser mentions the name Billy Rose, which Harry hears as Bellarosa. Only later does he realize that the person who has organized and funded the network that saved his life is a famous, indefatigably vulgar and flamboyant Broadway producer...
After exhausting their fascination with Margaret Thatcher, a few of the guests allow as how, yes, one might think that marrying dead people is bizarre. But as an occasional feature of life in these parts for longer than anyone can remember, "ghost marriages" are just another relic of ancient China, another relatively harmless superstition for a billion people struggling to jerk themselves toward the 21st century...
...Beijing and a village not far from the capital that is infinitely poorer than towns a thousand miles farther inland, I find little that is charming or especially exotic. Just a mostly drab and dusty country, a perfect backdrop for the tedious and too often unrewarding nature of daily life. Still, the people seem energetic, if fitful; a fifth of the world's population in a cage. Good, hardworking people who deserve better than the suffocating Communism that limits their enterprise...
...neighborhood committees that exist almost everywhere in China -- watchdog groups that keep an eye on everyone and everything -- are unnecessary in Wu's village. In tone and in fact, he controls almost every aspect of village life -- and the villagers have prospered thanks to his wisdom. When income from the local ice-cream factory fell short of projections, Wu converted the plant to a successful cotton-fabric operation in six months. When this summer's drought threatened to devastate the village's wheat and vegetable crops, Wu proposed that water from the Yellow River -- unused previously because...
...bookstores that one can best see how daily life has outgrown the political system's controls, how the campaign against "spiritual pollution," so rhetorically fierce, is flouted with such abandon. While elsewhere in China, government booklets like The True Story of Tiananmen Square are prominently displayed alongside issues of Vogue, Elle and Glamour, you have to hunt for the lies at Wangfujing, Beijing's largest bookstore. The section labeled "Ideology and Political Education" actually displays books titled Modern Woman, Smart Woman, Handbook on Love and Life and dozens of how- to monographs like Eighty-Eight Points on Developing Public Relations...