Word: myths
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...better understand "the mesmerizing force of the Chinese myth as well as the reasons why some people are brave or mad enough to challenge it," Buruma seeks out a wide and remarkably varied group of dissidents. The tour begins among the exiles in the U.S., and moves through the Chinese periphery?Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong?before wending its way through the P.R.C. to Beijing. What emerges from the journey is a detailed map of the international landscape of Chinese heterodoxies, an encyclopedic Who's Who of troublemakers that is engagingly anecdotal, often surprising and deeply insightful. Readers already acquainted...
...Capra's movies are the garden from which Americans were expelled, years ago, by their success and power and diversity--and by their bitter internal wars over, among others, Joe McCarthy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ho Chi Minh. The films archive the country's grainy common-man myth of itself, more generous and neighborly and decent, and a lot whiter (in a Norman Rockwell way) than America has proved to be, decades later, having made all that money and opened its doors to the world...
...ones were blotted out, and we all bought F.D.N.Y. HEROES caps and pinned red-white-and-blue ribbons to our lapels to celebrate the victory. But to those who lived that story and now rub up against its shards every day, resolution is nothing more than a mass-marketed myth. Their reality is raw and unending. Fire fighters and police brawl at ground zero. Tales of divorces spawned by Sept. 11 circle around the fire department. Widows squabble with one another over money, and this month one took her own life...
...Mike, myth and reality collide at nearly every juncture. People who see his compact, 5-ft. 7 1/2-in. frame in person insist he must be shorter than the beefy man in the photo. The guys at work grumble that all the attention is going to him instead of the six men missing from his firehouse. His wife E.J. demands to know why they have only had a 30-second conversation about Sept. 11. Everyone wants to know how many people the superhero pulled from the towers. The answer never changes: "I saved one person that day, and that...
...next day, history rose up and growled. And with that the testing began. Sometimes the greater the tragedy, the easier it is to learn wrong lessons from it: truth turns into myth, mortals into heroes, luck into fate, scars into badges. It is hard for the fire fighters, brave as they are, to be greeted as heroes everywhere they go, proposed to in bars, showered with gifts, when in private they know that many of them cannot sleep and cannot think and cannot find words longer than two syllables, and on the days they don't wake up feeling terrible...