Word: insight
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Pasqualini spent seven years in several labor camps, the likes of which presumably still exist and, as the only Westerner to come out of them, he provides an unusual insight into the philosophy that pervades Chinese life and politics--although from his account it's hard to tell just where the difference between the two lies. Pasqualini's French nationality offered a vague hope that his experience as a "broken plate" would end differently from that of Chinese prisoners. This was, indeed, realized by his release halfway through his sentence, in 1964, when the French and Chinese governments officially recognized...
...diary, just as Arthur Bremer did before he shot George Wallace.) What Scorsese is good at is moments-chance encounters between unlikely characters, awkward conversations between ignorant people, men and women trying, often with comic poignancy, to understand a world in which the old verities offer neither guidance nor insight. He can be an effective film maker, given a loose, unpretentious story like Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, where there is less temptation to make grand statements about the modern condition. He seems to need scripts with well-designed humor and performers with the spirit of Ellen Burstyn...
Unrelieved by engaging dialogue or insight, the book meanders from perversion to perversion, progressing through huge quantities of drugs and alcohol, through impotence and sadism, to a final act of dwarfish fistfucking. Amis is able to extricate himself from this morass only with difficulty, and the ending he chooses has an abrupt, they-all-get-run-over-by-a-truck quality...
...lesser hands, this seven-authored volume might have been no more than a polished family album. Instead, Leona and Jerrold Schecter and their children (who ranged in age from five to 13 when Schecter took over TIME's Moscow bureau in 1968) display insight and perceptions that lend their memory book a universal appeal...
...from being false also serves naturally as the support for the most reactionary of social doctrines. If people are, in fact, malleable and plastic beings with no essential psychological nature, then why should they not be controlled and coerced by those who claim authority, special knowledge, and a unique insight into what is best for those less enlightened...