American

"Sometimes it wasn’t even safe inside your home. Some friends we made over there were sitting in their living room watching television. Their house was up on stilts – as was typical – and was situated close enough to Guam to access a few of the American shows with a satellite. Next minute they hear a chainsaw, and someone is cutting a hole in their floor. Such was the sort of thing that went on. Even riots aside, it certainly wasn’t safe to go out at night. If we did, it was only by car, and we were sure to go straight to our destination. There was no stopping for petrol, and if you got a flat tyre, you drove the rest of the way home on it. The chance of being mugged was too high to risk."

"Hitting these numbers required escalating coercive tactics. The first measure in the official toolbox was browbeating. Local officials would visit pregnant women as part of “persuasion groups.” This posse of up to ten men seldom appeared as sweet-tongued advocates. One American academic witnessed a group of women in Guangdong separated from their husbands and sent to the village hall. There, they were given unceasing lectures to give up their pregnancy for the good of the country, and then were called upon one by one to give their consent to an abortion while being [prohibited from returning home](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor410) until they had done so. A 1982 *New York Times* report quoted a family planning official from Guangdong saying, “On average, each person takes 10 times to be persuaded. The most difficult person can take up to 100 times.” The piece also cites women [hauled before mass rallies](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor411) and harangued into consenting to an abortion."

"In an era in which Japan has all but given the boot to American technological leadership, it seems only reasonable that a corpo- ration whose subsidiaries in Europe are the largest independent software companies in their respective countries would be talked about constantly as an example of successful American multinationalism."

"To anyone who made an overture to him on the basis of his being a Jewish-American, Baruch’s response was invariably the assertion that he was an American, not a “hyphenate”"

"In 1943, to an American critic of the Raj, Churchill said, “Before we proceed any further, let us get one thing clear. Are we talking about the brown Indians in India, who have multiplied alarmingly under the benevolent British rule? Or are we speaking of the red Indians in America who, I understand, are almost extinct?”"

"As with John in Australia three years earlier, Craig’s hiring may have been a surprise to a few people who had thought Steve Ridgway’s successor (Steve had been Virgin Atlantic’s CEO for twelve years) was probably going to come from within the airline. Again, though, like in Australia, we opted to take someone from a big legacy carrier – it wasn’t the first time we went fishing at American, having hired David Cush from there to head up Virgin America some years earlier."

"Sol soaked up every ounce of knowledge that he could from the American. He now had to get back to South Africa and build his mini-Fontainebleau. Even if he did not fully realise it at the time, he had learned far more from Ben Novack than just how to design a resort hotel; he had also seen how to run one. The result was not a 1 000-room beachside hotel in an established resort town but a 72-room replica of the giant Miami hotel, located in an undeveloped village on South Africa’s Natal coast. Sol stopped short of naming his hotel the “Fontainebleau”, which his prospective local clientele would not have understood. Instead, he settled for “The Beverly Hills”. Everyone in South Africa knew what that meant."

"in the winter of 1950 I received my draft notice. A year earlier I had become, to my immense joy and pride, an American citizen. I had wrapped my Polish passport in a pink ribbon and sent it back to the Polish embassy. The Korean War had begun, and I considered it a privilege to serve in the army of my new homeland."