Word: peasant
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Life was not easy for Chiang Kai-shek's mother, Wang Tsai-yu, a simple peasant woman who was widowed early and did embroidery to send her promising son to academies in Paoting and Tokyo, Japan. When she died in 1921, the fast-rising young Chiang matched her devotion by building her an elaborate tomb in the eastern China mountain village of Chikow, where the family lived. Last week, calling her memorial a "source of poison in Chinese society," an official Peking report joyfully revealed that members of the Red Guards had attacked the tomb and razed...
...strategy of the Marines was correct, and victory in Viet Nam is being thwarted by the Army's blind reliance on hardware and explosives. Corson's chosen weapons are the type of security his tiny teams afforded, coupled with social justice and an attempt to free the peasant from both Saigon's tyranny and Viet Cong terror. "I don't want to see wars of national liberation become viable, exportable commodities," says Corson, who views the escalation from about 650 U.S. advisers in 1959 to today's 534,000 troops as a gambler...
...movies almost always portrayed U.S. dreams-and thus, indirectly, realities. Just as the peasant tales retold by the Grimm brothers spoke of common maidens who could spin gold from straw, Hollywood created its own folk stories from the yearnings of 1930s audiences. If I Had a Million, for example, tells of a quirky financier who sends million-dollar checks to strangers. A colorless clerk played by Charles Laughton receives his check in the mail, goes to the president of his company, sticks out his tongue and delivers a loud Bronx cheer. Blackout. In those precarious years, the vicarious thrill...
...Bolshevik coup in 1917 thus brought casual mating and divorce, and a brief fling at free love. The man who stopped it was that formidable patriarch Joseph Stalin, who proclaimed that the family was "the basic cell of society" and put himself on the side of old-fashioned peasant virtue. But even Stalin was not above endorsing a bit of pragmatic promiscuity when the times dictated. In 1944, with the population decimated by war, Stalin wanted to boost the birth rate and decreed that men would no longer be obliged either to admit paternity or provide any financial support...
...eloquence; yet in some peculiar way his characters speak a poignant, subliminal dialogue that makes the audience hear what does not quite get said. A supple cast that obviously loves and understands the play gives it emotive depth. As Hogan, W. B. Brydon is a raffish, truculent blend of peasant guile and blather, while Mitchell Ryan's sodden, dandyish Jim Tyrone is a tarnished peacock straight from Old Broadway. Salome Jens, with hoydenish charm, discloses the vulnerable waif inside the intimidating woman. Director Theodore Mann has sensitively staged the play in fidelity to O'Neill's intent...