Questões de Inglês

In 1946 a young U.S. diplomat named John Fischer wrote

an earnest little book called Why They Behave like Russians.

Fischer, who’d served with the United Nations in postwar Kiev

and Moscow, was attempting to explain to a bewildered U.S.

[5]  public why their wartime ally Joseph Stalin, recipient of billions

of dollars in American Lend-Lease aid, had suddenly turned on

Washington, declaring it a deadly enemy, and seemed hellbent

on starting a Third World War.

The book is still a fascinating reading – not least because

[10]  so many of its conclusions continue to ring true today. Fischer

calls Russia’s leaders “ the scared men in the Kremlin,” deeply

insecure behind their aggressive bluster and suspicious of any

internal political threat to their power. Russia is traumatized by

catastrophic historical upheavals and far weaker than it likes to

[15]  pretend. The nation, he warns, “may blunder into war as it

strives to build up a protective belt of satellite states outside

its vulnerable borders.” Today, with tensions rising again over

two Georgian breakaway regions effectively annexed by

Russia last summer, that line rings as true as it did at the dawn

[20]  of the Cold War.

(from The World According to Russia, in NEWSWEEK, September 7, 2009)

In 1946 a young U.S. diplomat named John Fischer wrote

an earnest little book called Why They Behave like Russians.

Fischer, who’d served with the United Nations in postwar Kiev

and Moscow, was attempting to explain to a bewildered U.S.

[5]  public why their wartime ally Joseph Stalin, recipient of billions

of dollars in American Lend-Lease aid, had suddenly turned on

Washington, declaring it a deadly enemy, and seemed hellbent

on starting a Third World War.

The book is still a fascinating reading – not least because

[10]  so many of its conclusions continue to ring true today. Fischer

calls Russia’s leaders “ the scared men in the Kremlin,” deeply

insecure behind their aggressive bluster and suspicious of any

internal political threat to their power. Russia is traumatized by

catastrophic historical upheavals and far weaker than it likes to

[15]  pretend. The nation, he warns, “may blunder into war as it

strives to build up a protective belt of satellite states outside

its vulnerable borders.” Today, with tensions rising again over

two Georgian breakaway regions effectively annexed by

Russia last summer, that line rings as true as it did at the dawn

[20]  of the Cold War.

(from The World According to Russia, in NEWSWEEK, September 7, 2009)

More than 200 European writers toured the United States in

the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, publishing mostly

contemptuous accounts of the makeshift nation for the delight of

their own provincial readers back home. Perhaps none of them

[5]  was so ill equipped as the ambivalent aristocrat Alexis de

Tocqueville, and perhaps no work so unlikely to endure as his

portrait Democracy in America. Tocqueville was just 25 when he

began his journey in 1831, a capable but undistinguished student

who had become a provincial administrator. He lacked the literary

[10]  stature of Charles Dickens or Frances Trollope or his cousin

Chautebriand whose reveries for the majestic American

landscape largely invented the Romantic tradition in France.

Tocquerville's purpose was somewhat narrower. He had come to

prepare an administrative report on American prisons.

[15]  It was not his book on prisons that mesmerized American

audiences, however. Edward Banfield called Democracy in

America "certainly the greatest book ever written by anyone about

America" - to which Gordon Wood has added, " not only on

America but also on democracy itself." George Wilson Pierson,

[20]  praised Tocqueville's "essentially 'binocular' " vision, and

presented the man who possessed it, a royalist scion, as a

prophet of the democratic era. Tocqueville has been cited so

often and so variously that the critic Caleb Crain has called him

cheekily, " the Nostradamus of democracy ".

[25]  In fact, Tocqueville seems nothing more than an

impressionable amanuensis. Tocqueville praised New England

meetings but never bothered to observe one. Nor any revival

camp meetings. He didn't visit a single American college.

Tocqueville stayed a month in Boston but declined to visit the

[30]  factories in Lowell. Or any other factories. A putative prophet of

the American century, Tocqueville was remarkably blind to the

unfolding 19th-century revolution in American industry and as a

celebrated chronicler of the American character he missed

perhaps the most striking feature of the nation in the age of

[35]  Jackson - that it was changing, and very fast.

(from Democracy in America, by David Wallace-Wells in NEWSWEEK, April 26, 2010)

More than 200 European writers toured the United States in

the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, publishing mostly

contemptuous accounts of the makeshift nation for the delight of

their own provincial readers back home. Perhaps none of them

[5]  was so ill equipped as the ambivalent aristocrat Alexis de

Tocqueville, and perhaps no work so unlikely to endure as his

portrait Democracy in America. Tocqueville was just 25 when he

began his journey in 1831, a capable but undistinguished student

who had become a provincial administrator. He lacked the literary

[10]  stature of Charles Dickens or Frances Trollope or his cousin

Chautebriand whose reveries for the majestic American

landscape largely invented the Romantic tradition in France.

Tocquerville's purpose was somewhat narrower. He had come to

prepare an administrative report on American prisons.

[15]  It was not his book on prisons that mesmerized American

audiences, however. Edward Banfield called Democracy in

America "certainly the greatest book ever written by anyone about

America" - to which Gordon Wood has added, " not only on

America but also on democracy itself." George Wilson Pierson,

[20]  praised Tocqueville's "essentially 'binocular' " vision, and

presented the man who possessed it, a royalist scion, as a

prophet of the democratic era. Tocqueville has been cited so

often and so variously that the critic Caleb Crain has called him

cheekily, " the Nostradamus of democracy ".

[25]  In fact, Tocqueville seems nothing more than an

impressionable amanuensis. Tocqueville praised New England

meetings but never bothered to observe one. Nor any revival

camp meetings. He didn't visit a single American college.

Tocqueville stayed a month in Boston but declined to visit the

[30]  factories in Lowell. Or any other factories. A putative prophet of

the American century, Tocqueville was remarkably blind to the

unfolding 19th-century revolution in American industry and as a

celebrated chronicler of the American character he missed

perhaps the most striking feature of the nation in the age of

[35]  Jackson - that it was changing, and very fast.

(from Democracy in America, by David Wallace-Wells in NEWSWEEK, April 26, 2010)

More than 200 European writers toured the United States in

the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, publishing mostly

contemptuous accounts of the makeshift nation for the delight of

their own provincial readers back home. Perhaps none of them

[5]  was so ill equipped as the ambivalent aristocrat Alexis de

Tocqueville, and perhaps no work so unlikely to endure as his

portrait Democracy in America. Tocqueville was just 25 when he

began his journey in 1831, a capable but undistinguished student

who had become a provincial administrator. He lacked the literary

[10]  stature of Charles Dickens or Frances Trollope or his cousin

Chautebriand whose reveries for the majestic American

landscape largely invented the Romantic tradition in France.

Tocquerville's purpose was somewhat narrower. He had come to

prepare an administrative report on American prisons.

[15]  It was not his book on prisons that mesmerized American

audiences, however. Edward Banfield called Democracy in

America "certainly the greatest book ever written by anyone about

America" - to which Gordon Wood has added, " not only on

America but also on democracy itself." George Wilson Pierson,

[20]  praised Tocqueville's "essentially 'binocular' " vision, and

presented the man who possessed it, a royalist scion, as a

prophet of the democratic era. Tocqueville has been cited so

often and so variously that the critic Caleb Crain has called him

cheekily, " the Nostradamus of democracy ".

[25]  In fact, Tocqueville seems nothing more than an

impressionable amanuensis. Tocqueville praised New England

meetings but never bothered to observe one. Nor any revival

camp meetings. He didn't visit a single American college.

Tocqueville stayed a month in Boston but declined to visit the

[30]  factories in Lowell. Or any other factories. A putative prophet of

the American century, Tocqueville was remarkably blind to the

unfolding 19th-century revolution in American industry and as a

celebrated chronicler of the American character he missed

perhaps the most striking feature of the nation in the age of

[35]  Jackson - that it was changing, and very fast.

(from Democracy in America, by David Wallace-Wells in NEWSWEEK, April 26, 2010)