The Boys of Summer The Boys of Summer
To the list of movie characters who look back on their lives from the Beyond, add Lester Burnham, the 42-year-old, dead narrator of American Beauty. He is a murder victim--so it ...
Sep 23, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Our Prison Complex Our Prison Complex
This past winter both Edwin Meese and Gen. Barry McCaffrey expressed surprising misgivings about the current direction of the War on Drugs.
Sep 23, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Theodore Hamm
Sunstein’s Law Sunstein’s Law
He criticizes the liberal Warren Court for breaking new constitutional ground on too many fronts too broadly, while also giving no quarter to the constitutional theories of conse...
Sep 23, 1999 / Books & the Arts / David Rudenstine
Adults Only Adults Only
Conventional wisdom has it that Americans stopped attending foreign films as soon as the domestic ones started featuring bare breasts. Convention, as usual, is too simple.
Sep 16, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Decolonizing the Mind Decolonizing the Mind
As Hawaii's first American century comes to an end, marking grim anniversaries of overthrow and forced annexation by the United States, a groundswell for Native Hawaiian sovereig...
Sep 16, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Mindy Pennybacker
Candid in Camera Candid in Camera
It all began in the heat of the summer of 1940. Hitler was at his peak in Europe. France had been defeated.
Sep 9, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Gore Vidal
War of the Worlds War of the Worlds
When a boy comes of age in a movie made by Francophones, he's generally obliged to visit a brothel.
Sep 9, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Behind the Blue Helmets Behind the Blue Helmets
The new US envoy to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, has personal experience of how frustrating it can be to negotiate, even when speaking in the name of that mega-clich&ea...
Sep 9, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Ian Williams
Kilroy Was There Kilroy Was There
In the summer of 1941, Adolf Hitler's apparently invincible Wehrmacht was grinding hundreds of miles into the Soviet Union, spreading mayhem all the way.
Sep 2, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Tom Wicker
Harnessing the Rising Sun Harnessing the Rising Sun
Americans aren't much for history these days. History is for Europeans--for Germans, with their thickets of theory, and the French, who are forever going on about their revolutio...
Sep 2, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Patrick Smith