Word: alien
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...sending a series of movies to New York which amounted to little other than propagandistic harangues (with the Bolshoi thrown in to keep things clean), present us with a warm, deeply moving, and totally human film. This is difficult to reconcile with our concept of a culture that is alien, coldly technological, and unconcerned with problems not directly relating to the Soviet State. So we describe it as a miracle, an artistic exception that proves the rule which we feel comfortable believing in; and, finally we want to conclude that it is above politics...
...lawyer. Strangers is a grim little book but an uncompromisingly honest one. Author Memmi confines himself to a careful, patient piling up of telling detail and harsh, spare dialogue that conveys its own message: love, intelligence and good will are not enough when caught in the blind struggle between alien cultures...
...longer and more pretentious piece, and it comes much closer to justifying its pretentions than either of Kelly's previous Advocate stories. As with Kelly's earlier works, it concerns a young boy (called Mr. Leland), his relations to his parents, and his reactions to a slightly alien world. The story is simple: the boy's father dies of tuberculosis, people come to condole, the mother ties together all of the father's belongings, including an expensive wooden bed, and burns them in back of the house...
...have, as George Washington counseled in his Farewell Address, "as little political connection as possible" with foreign nations. That outlook came to be called "isolationism," though what Washington advised, and what most Americans wanted, was not isolation but avoidance of permanent entanglements that might drag the U.S. into alien quarrels or impair its sovereignty. Cabot Lodge, before World War II, outspokenly shared that viewpoint. He fought most of F.D.R.'s attempts to commit the U.S. to the allied side, though he backed Roosevelt's big defense budgets...
...ramshackle farms of Fred Ricketts and Bud Woods. Tennessee-born Jim Agee felt the call of blood as well as the vast bond of compassion, since his father's people had come down from the hills back of Knoxville. But Agee also felt that he was an alien and a spy, prying into the lives of an "undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings." He tried to find at least partial absolution in sleeping in beds that swarmed with fleas, lice and bedbugs, gasping through the offal stench, and ignoring his nausea to "eat for a few weeks...