Word: odd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Retired and a widower, he tries to recollect the odd story of Harry Fonstein, the nephew of his father's second wife. He has not seen Harry and his wife Sorella for 30 years, but he finds them disturbingly memorable. Harry had reached the U.S. through bizarre circumstances. Barely escaping his native Poland ahead of the Nazis, he finally fetched up in Rome, only to be arrested by Mussolini's police. Soon, he was approached by an Italian man and given instructions on how to walk out of jail, go to Genoa and get on a ship bound for freedom...
Strange, surely, but about the only truly odd tradition I encounter during five weeks in China. By plane, train and car, from the prospering coastal provinces to the country's heartland, where the agricultural reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping ten years ago began a miraculous economic transformation, to 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...
Eventually, a few acquaintances began to wonder about Maurice. It appeared odd, to say the least, that he could speak only halting French. And what about those vivid blue contact lenses? And where did he get that Southern accent? If he was in his mid-30s as he looked, what was he doing in school? Was this guy for real...
...chiefly Jamaicans, come to South Florida each winter to do it. That is what Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer for The New Yorker, did when he came across this information in a 1984 newspaper story. Other questions aroused Wilkinson's interest as a reporter. Among them: Is it not odd that a major domestic cash crop should be so heavily dependent on imported black labor? What is going on down there? For the next four years, Wilkinson paid a number of visits to South Florida trying to find...
...showed students' ability to govern themselves--was that which unfolded at year's end, eventually before headlines nationwide. When the Undergraduate Council voted on April 24 to ask for the return of Reserve Officers Training Corps to Harvard (ROTC), it believed it was performing a service to the 90-odd undergraduate ROTC participants forced to commute to MIT for the program...