Word: pots
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pot is an elusive study, returning from Europe in 1953 to live a double life: one Pol Pot holds secret political meetings in a spartan shack in a Phnom Penh slum; the other courts a high-society belle in a black Citro?n sedan and "dances very well, in the Western style," a colleague recalled. Short attributes this duality to a "gift for subterfuge"?Pol Pot was so secretive that many mid-level Khmer Rouge officials did not know his real identity until two years after he had seized power. (Pol Pot is a nom de guerre adopted...
...Short accurately describes Pol Pot's 1975-1979 regime as "a slave state, the first in modern times." His account of those hellish years?1.5 million people murdered, starved or worked to death?is familiar yet shocking. Almost as shocking is the sheer incompetence of Pol Pot's rule. He had barely come to power before initiating the policies that helped him lose it: the evacuation of urban centers, which caused mass rural starvation, and the extermination of the skilled and the educated. In 1978, dimly sensing his reign of terror was collapsing, he issued a belated directive for cadres...
...Short is too good a writer to simply dismiss Pol Pot as an evil aberration. But his alternative argument?that brutality is somehow hardwired into Cambodian society?is not scholarly enough to be convincing. He makes his case largely by an unblinking focus on horror: children decapitated, lynch mobs eating their victims' fried livers, and so on. This attempt to place Pol Pot's wickedness in a wider psychohistorical context feels misguided rather than malicious, although Cambodian readers might feel differently...
...reminder of the difficulties of successfully imposing democracy through force, a lesson being relearned from scratch in Iraq. If Cambodians are, as Short says, "oddly reluctant" to analyze the violence and corruption that plagues their society, it is because most are still too busy trying to survive it. Pol Pot is gone, but history is a nightmare from which his beleaguered compatriots are still trying to awake...
...huge Howgate Wonder, just one of which could fill three apple pies. The plant center sells around 75 different apple trees, but if you can't find your favorite, Brogdale's experts will grow one especially for you. They can also recommend trees that will happily thrive in a pot on a balcony, provide an orchard design service tailored to soil or climate, or even suggest historically accurate trees for a period house. Visitors are welcome year-round and can take guided orchard tours ($7 per person) between March and November. tel: (44-1795) 535286; www.brogdale.org