Word: peasants
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...geographic heart of the country, to the scrubby woodland and remote, poor villages that blanket a huge chunk of central India. The would-be revolutionaries trace their roots back to 1967, when a group of activists split away from India's mainstream Communist Party and initiated a peasant uprising in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari. The Naxalite movement grew quickly and attracted landless laborers and student intellectuals, but a government crackdown in the 1970s broke the group into myriad feuding factions. By the 1990s, as India began to liberalize its economy and economic growth took off, violent revolution seemed...
...Timothy J. Colton has written a fine biography of Russia's first postcommunist President. He has done his homework, going to the Urals, for example, to talk to individuals who knew Yeltsin in his poverty-stricken childhood. One finding: a grandfather of Yeltsin's was persecuted as a rich peasant when Stalin imposed agricultural collectivization. Colton also spoke to acquaintances from Yeltsin's period as Communist Party boss in Sverdlovsk. He justifiably concludes that Yeltsin was already a rambunctious politician before Gorbachev promoted him to head the Moscow City Party in 1985. Yeltsin was like a bull in a china...
...live in a hundred-year-old house overlooking the harbor, the straits, and the bay. From the bedroom window, I see an island of ghosts. It is a peaked mountain shaped like a peasant's conical hat. A hundred years ago, the island was the quarantine station for Chinese immigrants, some detained so long they wrote poems about loneliness. No one lives on the island anymore. At night, it is a purple shadow. Sometimes I think about the young woman whose father built her this house a hundred years ago. She must have seen lanterns blaze on the island...
...turned a page and paused, absorbed in a pencil sketch which he had executed as a youth on holiday by the Mediterranean sea. “That peasant girl,” he thought. “Her eyes expressed a sentiment at once so simple and so profound.” He was astonished at the skill with which his twenty-year-old self had rendered the play of light and shadow...
...Obama's mother finally finished her Ph.D. dissertation, which she had worked on, between jobs, for almost two decades. The thesis is 1,000 pages, a meticulous analysis of peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia. The glossary, which she describes as "far from complete," is 24 pages. She dedicated the tome to her mother; to Dewey, her adviser; "and to Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field...