Word: opium
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...place is Iran and the time is 1991, when Satrapi was 20. The dominant character is the grandmother, who Satrapi depicts as a highly independent, worldly woman who goes from bad-tempered ogre to mild and caring "grandma" only after having her morning tea with a bit of opium mixed in. After the dishes are done, she presides over more tea as the women exchange juicy gossip and confession in a process best described by the grandmother. "Speaking behind other's backs ventilates the heart." Briefly liberated from the constraints of their male-dominated culture the women speak freely...
...past or at least embraces it ironically; the classics have their place, but rock and pop music continues to push forward in the quarters kept from the masses by forces that are strikingly close to Mill’s tyranny of the majority. Let them have their opium of the people, I say, but let’s not forget that this isn’t the business of the critic: active contemplation of rock has long since been the cliché of the junkie, the obsessed, not the commuter struggling through traffic...
...background scenes as the sailors' prison in San Francisco, a "bin full of murderers, cutthroats, sodomists, and mutineers dredged from the leaky hulls that jammed the docks." He also does some riffs on Chinese secret societies, the erotic kinks of foot-bound "sing-song girls," and the power of opium in a culture in which at least one Chamber of Commerce used the drug as the official standard of exchange. To his appetite for low company Seagrave adds an urbane taste for incongruity, a penchant for Edwardian epigrams ("There is a time for fools to come forth, when only bandits...
...while, Seagrave is zestfully constructing an arresting case against his subjects. If the Soongs seemed larger than life, he argues, it was because they shrouded themselves in self-created legends. In fact, he insists, the family treated national funds as play dough, milking the opium market, pocketing American loans and hatching so many wartime scams that within five months of being installed at a rate of four to $1, the gold yuan had plunged to a rate of 1 million to $1. He further repeats the familiar charge that in 1934 the Generalissimo, hell-bent on settling scores with...
...future President's father James was widower of 52 when he suddenly proposed marriage to the equally lofty Sara Delano, age 26. The reason the Delanos were so privileged was that Sara's father was one of those 19th century entrepreneurs who had made a fortune smuggling Turkish opium into China...