Word: firsthand
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Since the war, European intellectuals have been playing a game. It is called "Analyzing America." Anyone can play, and firsthand knowledge of America is not required; in fact, too close an acquaintance with the U.S. is considered unsporting. There are no qualifications beyond a smattering of psychoanalytic vocabulary, an ability to generalize from the small to the big (e.g., the luxuriousness of American spittoons proves the wastefulness of the U.S. economy) and a limited awareness of U.S. social customs which need be no more recent than the novels of Theodore Dreiser. A typewriter and a subscription to Britain...
Vienna-born Marguerite Sieghart, a legal authority and author of Government by Decree, can give firsthand evidence; she is "between 40 and 60" and has been divorced...
...pair of young Iron Curtain refugees turned up in London's Festival Hall last week and put on a rare show: a firsthand demonstration of contemporary Russian ballet style. They were Hungary's Istvan Rabovsky, 23, and his wife, Nora Kovach, 21, since 1949 leading dancers in the Leningrad, Moscow and Budapest Opera ballets. They danced the Grand Pas de Deux from Don Quixote-a circusy old number that gave little chance for high art but plenty for high jumps-with a kind of brilliant virtuosity that left balletomanes' toes twitching. Istvan won top honors with...
...recently divorced from an American wife, is something of a phenomenon in Costa Rica. After college, he bought a barren finca in Cartago which he called La Lucha Sin Fin (Struggle Without End), in recognition of the farmer's never-ending battle with nature. There he learned firsthand about the peasants' problems, set up a private welfare state for his own workers. He built them clean bungalows, saw them well fed from a community vegetable farm and a dairy that provided free milk for every child. In 1948, when the outgoing government tried to deny the legally elected...
...working for the German Red Cross. A onetime director of Düsseldorf's City Hospital, Keusen decided that his country had suffered too much from specialists-tough Realpolitiker, spiritual flagpole-sitters, and thought-spinning intellectuals. What was needed, he felt, was to reunite education and firsthand experience of life and to weld both within the Christian tradition. Keusen, a convert from Roman Catholicism, set out to mold a new type of German youth "who knows something, who is somebody, and who believes in something...