It’s become a familiar lament: Globalization is wreaking enormous cultural loss. Alexander Stille’s illuminating and engrossing new book, The Future of the Past , manages to drain the phrase cultural loss of its easy melancholy and explore instead what it actually means . In chapters set in an array of locales India, Egypt, Madagascar, Somalia, Read More
The war film is the one cinematic genre that can exploit massively homicidal violence while professing to make a moral statement about it. Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down , from a screenplay by Ken Nolan, based on the book by Mark Bowden, is a spectacular case in point, with its nearly two-hour orgy of killing Read More
At first glance, the line of boys from the Allen-Stevenson School leaving the 19th Precinct last Monday in their blue blazers and khaki slacks seemed to suggest that things were returning to normal.
School groups would frequently visit the station house in less eventful times for a tour that included the holding cell off the Read More
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War , by Mark Bowden. Atlantic Monthly Press, 386 pages, $24.
Over the course of a single afternoon in 1986, I had the unpleasant opportunity to watch while 14 people were condemned to death, one after another, on the island of Grenada. The guilty had, in the midst Read More
