Word: margarete
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High Tea in Mosul follows two Englishwomen, longtime friends Pauline (a pseudonym) and Margaret (her real name), who married Iraqi students they met in England and moved in the 1970s to the ancient northern Iraqi city of Mosul. In 2003 they met the author - an Australian then covering the war for the Irish Times - shortly after coalition troops freed the city. O'Donnell's book is a brief, devastating account of how these women's lives change over three increasingly grim decades in their adopted country...
...Margaret and Pauline's early years in Iraq are a time of relative comfort, of trading tips with other expats on where to find potatoes and Western clothes. War with Iran brings increased state propaganda and a clampdown on dissent that makes Iraqis distrustful of neighbors. Then, in 1990, international sanctions bring food shortages and ration lines. Operation Iraqi Freedom seems a godsend, but optimism fizzles when there's no new order to fill the post-Saddam vacuum. By 2005, the women are all but trapped in their own homes, depressed, often without electricity, scared of random violence...
Seen through the eyes of these two ordinary women, Iraq's victims and villains are richly human, with clear and comprehensible motives. Margaret's husband joins the ruling Baath Party in the Saddam years because it's the best way to advance his career; U.S. soldiers break down doors and drive tanks through generator lines because they're too focused on insurgent attacks to worry about what's in their path...
...59th annual Boston University Trophy took place over the weekend, with the Crimson finishing in fourth place. Senior skipper Matthew Knowles and senior crew Ashley Nathanson won A-division in decisive fashion for Harvard, while senior skipper Robby McIntosh and sophomore crew Margaret Wang took 10th for the Crimson in B-division. The first-place showing from Knowles and Nathanson was particularly surprising considering that the two don’t normally sail together...
...like this? How did a society whose professed virtues were once those of duty, honor and discretion become a place of in-it-for-myself, let-it-all-hang-out emoting? Step forward those two women whose influence, combined - though one suspects they loathed each other - shaped a nation: Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana...