Word: peasant
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Pepita, ostensibly a biography of Victoria's mother, offered a devastating portrait of Vita Sackville-West's own mother, a "pure undiluted peasant," whose tantrums made austere Knole echo like some Andalusian marketplace. Victoria, wrote her daughter, was "a powerful dynamo generating nothing," an imperious, high-strung woman given to firing her servants on a whim and more turbulent than Lady Macbeth. "I think perhaps you do not realise," Victoria complained to Lord Kitchener in the midst of World War I, "that we employ five carpenters and four painters and two blacksmiths and two footmen...
...sharply lowered productivity of the village, the Khmer Rouge controller drives the survivors out into the fields at 4 a.m. for a twelve-hour workday. The daily food ration per person is seven spoonfuls of boiled rice gruel. Since last July there have been four suicides. Other peasants have gone berserk in the fields or have retreated into total, pathological silence. One Ko Tayou villager who fled to Thailand last month was Kim Am, 42, a Canadian-trained physician who survived the purges by masquerading as an illiterate peasant. According to Kim, at least 80% of the Cambodians he observed...
...necessary beauty and wholesomeness to appeal to the American public." The variables considered include talent, hair, makeup, gowns, poise and walk, and conversation. The Betamax affirms that where talent is concerned, Christine should have the contest pretty well sewed up. Her rendering of Bartok's Hungarian Peasant Songs on the flute is professional, pure and austere when compared with the frothier offerings of other contestants. But in many ways she is like a whole new breed of Miss America aspirants, far from a beauty-queen type. Tall and girl-next-door pretty, she is a pale brunette...
Ironically, the scandal is one consequence of Brazil's economic advance. For more than a decade, millions of peasant families have fled the countryside in search of factory jobs in the cities. For most, the effort has been futile. Lacking skills and education, they have settled for poverty-level employment at best-and in all too many instances, no job at all. By working ten hours a day, six days a week, an ambitious woman might earn about $75 per month, scarcely enough to survive in a wooden and tin-can hovel, let alone support her children...
Such candid statements appear throughout Fools Die. Novelist Puzo enjoys casting a sly peasant eye on pretension and selfdelusion. When moralist Puzo judges his characters' behavior it is not because that behavior offends convention but because it endangers survival. Merlyn's warning to a promiscuous actress about the dangers of V.D. echoes an Army training film, though the reader may not be sure whether the author is trying to be funny or just didactic. The novel's biggest flaw is a switching back and forth from third-to first-person narrative, thus violating Puzo's own first rule of writing...