Word: understanding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...paintings, Arthur Schnitzler's plays, all had their roots in the city. But Hitler dismissed modern art as "decadent." To the impotent and solitary figure, power was what mattered, not aesthetics. The Ring of the Nibelung proved more fascinating for the drama than for the music. "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany," Hitler often said, "must know Wagner." Particularly the heroic, irrational world of blood and fire...
Friedman's ability to draw the reader into his world is epitomized by his description of a stone-throwing attack by a Palestinian on his family's car. You feel the rock hit the windshield, you see the determined, unemotional look on the stone-thrower's face and you understand the reactions of the scared wife and two young children facing a shattered windshield...
Hama Rules are the only ones that apply in the Middle East, but the U.S. cannot understand them. Players obeying the Hama Rules orchestrated the 1983 suicide truck bombing attack on U.S. marines stationed in Beirut. Even Israel follows the rules--it invited Phalangist militia into the Lebanese towns of Sabra and Shatila and failed to stop the massacre of up to 1000 people...
...often get lost in my grandmother's stories. They are filled with connections I miss, names of people I don't know and things I don't understand. But I know they would be really interesting if I could just get the people straight...
...same time, however, Goodman's world is sometines difficult to understand, and her writing style is not helpful. The world she creates--whether it is in Hawaii, England or the American mainland--requires total immersion to read. With her multitude of names of the people streaming in and out her characters' lives and Goodman's frequent use of Hebrew, Yiddish and Hawaiian terms, the book is sometimes painful to wade through. Goodman writes...