Word: mockler
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Where will those families go? And whose school districts can afford to absorb their children? In California, school officials are expecting to receive upwards of $8 billion over two years from the federal stimulus. While this money would enable districts to address some of their most pressing needs, John Mockler, an education-funding specialist in Sacramento, says, "It's not a panacea." In the long term, Mockler says, states need to come up with new funding sources to support classroom instruction and let teachers do what they were hired to do - teach...
...counterattack, Ethiopian soldiers took only five prisoners. They did not understand the Italian arms-up attitude of surrender, Mockler reports, and simply found an enemy thus exposed an even more convenient target for rifle or scimitar. The invaders retaliated with mustard gas, dropped by plane. The war was won from the air. Seven months after the invasion, Ethiopia was defeated, annexed, and soon turned into a rigid Fascist colony...
...subjugation was never complete. An assassination attempt against a group of Italian overlords prompted murderous reprisals. They in turn ignited a guerrilla campaign (a tactic Mockler thinks the Ethiopians should have used from the beginning instead of suicidal frontal assaults). But not until Britain and Italy opposed each other in World War II did Italy's grip truly loosen. One of the attacking British contingents was a motley group called Gideon Force, led by Palestine Veteran and ardent Zionist Orde Wingate. Escorted by the force, Haile Selassie re-entered Addis Ababa in triumph...
...Mockler suggests the essentials of his characters in swift strokes. "I am not happy," Wingate confides to a subordinate. "But then, I have been thinking, no great man ever was really happy." And the author is an excellent guide through the winding complexities of Ethiopian culture, its ancient Coptic Christian religion and its legendary past (the first Emperor, Menelik I, was purported to be the son of the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba...
...Sidney Barton, the eccentric British envoy who provided the model for Sir Samson Courteney in Evelyn Waugh's farce Black Mischief. Here are camels and trucks, scimitars and machine guns, lions and airplanes in a clash of politics and, more significantly, of centuries. It is a tribute to Mockler that he has managed to make this convoluted tale lucid and compelling. Still, he needed some five decades to go by before the sorrows of Ethiopia could be seen in light of the calamities of Abyssinia. --By Mayo Mohs