James George Frazer - The Golden Bough
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=e13-dQbF9hUC&dq=fraser+golden&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=hTEsq04Rpv&sig=pbiXRRszuNqK4S3IcytspiUQNbU&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPP15,M1


>>East Berlin was some place I visited and had friends there. I once told the story of the man who went to work and was never able to go home and see his wife. The closed the border in one night. Started at midnight and by daybreak, the border was closed. Families were cut off from each other. When I met him he had not seen her in 40 years other than at christmas and then not every year.
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>I've met my share of cases. Once, I was hitchhiking my way home from college (wasn't that far so we went home for weekends), and while waiting met an old guy who told me a story about how he ended up a Soviet prisoner after WWII and worked in salt mines for a few years before being released. I had rent a room from a guy with a very strange last name (something with a Germanic root but ending with -chich); the story about him was that he was three times sentenced to death in Romania, as a titoist, between 1948 and 1953. Had quite a young wife, and a kid born probably around '66. Another story was an old Romanian Serb, who was always branded as sort-of-titoist, always under suspicion, but never officially sentenced to anything. He was forced into and out of retirement several times, his son couldn't get into a college. I remember I brought him Frazer's "Golden bough" (which I had trouble finding on Wikipedia just now - knew the sound of his name but not the spelling, tried Frasier,
>Fraser, tried "golden" but got a lot of "globe award", "golden branch"... spelling is indeed a thing to cast and see what sticks).
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>>Reagan's speach was crucial for its timing and what was already happening in East Berlin (the leadup to the peace protest)politically, but it was Schabowski's mistake that led to the actual fall of the wall at that specific time. Today East Berliners are still sometimes referred to as suffering from 'the wall in the head' due to cultural differences and living for so long under such restrictions and having unrealistic expections of wealth in the west. Interesting perspective on Reagan and the arms race - one I totally disagree with. Reagan was in fact working towards a better arms control agreement that had heavy opposition from conservatives at the time. This is an opinion piece, but one that I think is pretty accurate:
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>>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/opinion/10mann.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
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>Just goes (where?) to show that the politics is a zig-zag line between obstacles on the course, and that, as CharlesH would say, perceptions mean a lot.
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>The perspective as of today ("he drove USSR into bankruptcy by forcing them to overspend on weapons") is probably quite wrong, but that's personality cult. The cult will believe what it wants.
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>And yeh, while trying to negotiate with the Soviets on one side, he was trying to gain the upper hand on the other - but Star Wars came up as a legendary series of movies, and also as a legendary waste of money on something that doesn't work. It's technology, right? It's 20+ years ago - ergo, obsolete already - and it still doesn't work.