On top of his fine analytical and motor skills on the baseball field, Ichiro seems to possess the motivational skills necessary to manage an American baseball team, or so reports Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports, who credits Ichiro’s motivational speeches for the American League’s string of wins in recent All-Star Games. Look for him to [...]
From Mira, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1979), pp. v-vii (my translation):
Here is a book that I never in my whole life would have thought to write, or if I had ever thought to write it, I would have imagined something completely different from that which was imposed by the cruel circumstances I lived through [...]
From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 321-326:
The coup in Lisbon in April 1974 changed the fortunes of Rhodesia irrevocably. The end of Portuguese rule in Mozambique not only deprived Rhodesia of a long-standing ally and brought to power there a left-wing nationalist movement; [...]
From First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, by George Weller (1907-2002), ed. by Anthony Weller (Three Rivers, 2006), pp. 63-67:
Underground in the mine you could always tell when the B-29s were making a visit overhead. The main power plant on the surface closed down, the weaker [...]
My sociolinguistics professor in grad school once opined that the best place to learn a foreign language was in a foreign prison. I assume he was thinking of the advantages of a complete immersion environment, total physical response methodology, and very rigorous incentive structures.
He must have been at least half serious, because he later applied [...]
From First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, by George Weller (1907-2002), ed. by Anthony Weller (Three Rivers, 2006), pp. 56-57 (reviewed at length in Japan Focus and more briefly at HNN):
Omuta, Japan—Wednesday, September 12, 1945, 0100 hours
Allied Prison Camp #17, Omuta, Kyushu
American and Chinese prisoner coal [...]
The Far Outliers spent last weekend in the stormy Wisconsin Dells, celebrating my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday with a small family reunion in a cabin at Cedar Crest Lodge on the Wisconsin River, just off Sauk County Highway A, barely half a mile from where Lake Delton cut a new path (or widened an old path) [...]
From Frank McLynn’s review of The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Yale University Press, 2008) in Literary Review:
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Comanches were a small tribe of hunter-gatherers in New Mexico. Once they acquired the use of horses, in three generations they evolved into the ‘Spartans of the plains’ and provided [...]
From Plain Buggies: Amish, Mennonite, and Brethren Horse-Drawn Transportation (Intercourse, Penn.: Good Books, 1998), by Stephen Scott, pp. 46-47:
The open spring wagon, the utility vehicle with one seat and a hauling space in back, has a wide variety of local names. In Holmes County, Ohio, it is a “Hack”; in Arthur, Illinois, a “Buckboard”; in [...]
New York Times editorial board member Brent Staples has some interesting background on how people of mixed race (as legally defined) evaded the Jim Crow laws in Caroline County, Virginia. It’s entitled Loving v. Virginia and the Secret History of Race:
Americans born in the 21st century will shake their heads in disbelief on learning that [...]
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