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A prep course for the month-long World Cup soccer tournament , a worldwide phenomenon to be played in the United States for the first time beginning June 17 , is available in a set of three home videos . Each of the three volumes by PolyGram Video lists for $ 14.95 and has a running time of about 60 minutes . The three volumes : `` World Cup USA '94 : The Official Preview , '' which includes a tournament history with footage all the way back to the first World Cup held in 1930 . There 's a look at the training of the 1994 U.S. team and a profile of Brazil 's Pele , just 17 when he took the 1958 event by storm , repeating in 1962 and 1970 . `` Top 50 Great World Cup Goals , '' highlighting exciting moments from competition beginning in 1966 with favorites such as Pele , Johan Cruyff , Diego Maradona , Roberto Baggio , Salvatore `` Toto '' Schillaci and Franz Beckenbauer . `` Great World Cup Superstars , '' focusing on the top names in the game , featured in the `` Goals '' cassette , and adding some interviews that offer an insight into what makes these stars shine . Three new basketball videos available : `` Sir Charles '' takes a look at the on-court intensity and dynamic skills of Charles Barkley of the Phoenix Suns as well as his entertaining off-court persona. $ 19.98 , 50 minutes , 1-800-999-VIDEO . `` NBA Superstars 3 '' follows up on two previous hit videos meshing the moves of the NBA 's elite with today 's hit music . This one includes Kenny Anderson , Steve Smith , Derrick Coleman , Larry Johnson , Dan Majerle , Alonzo Mourning , Hakeem Olajuwon , Mark Price , Shawn Kemp , Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars . Their play is matched with the music of Erick Sermon , M People , LL Cool J , Celine Dion , Domino , Soulhat , Soul Asylum , Buckshot LeFonque , Branford Marsalis , Pearl Jam and Rozella. $ 19.98 , 50 minutes , 1-800-999-VIDEO . `` Hog Wild : The Official 1994 NCAA Championship Video '' recaptures the excitement of the latest edition of March Madness and Arkansas 's march to the title with rousing victories over Michigan , Arizona and Duke in the three final games. $ 19.98 , 45 minutes , 1-800-747-7999 .
Canadian River Expeditions offers a change from the usual theme-park vacation : five 11-day float trips from July 1 to Aug. 31 that take families through some of British Columbia 's most scenic territory . Travel for these Chilcotin-Fraser tours is by yacht , seaplane and raft through deep fjords where bald eagles wheel through the sky and the water is filled with seals , whales and some of the biggest salmon in the world . Highlights include winging on a seaplane over icefields , hiking trips and fishing expeditions . The raft rides are not white knuckle adventures it 's mostly gentle floating . A few hours a day are spent on the water , with the rest of the time devoted to guided sightseeing and nature walks . Price is $ 2,325 , including round-trip airfare to Vancouver , meals and accommodations , as well as camping gear . Call your travel agent or ( 604 ) 738-4449 . Trafalgar Tours is offering 16 `` Best of ... '' trips to Europe for 1994 . `` Best of Britain , '' for example , takes in all of England and Scotland in 15 days for $ 1,099 . A 14-day `` Best of France '' trip for $ 1,260 covers the country from north to south , including Monaco , and a `` Best of Switzerland '' itinerary combines Zurich , St. Moritz , Zermatt , Geneva , Interlaken and Lucerne in 9 nine days for $ 799 . Other packages are available for Spain , Italy , Germany , Austria , Holland , Norway , Sweden and Denmark , Belgium and Holland , among others . Prices exclude airfare . Call your travel agent or ( 800 ) 457-6891 . Airlines are offering , or continuing , special price packages for travelers flying to Europe , the Mideast and the Far East . IPI World Travel and Delta Airlines , for example , are rolling back prices for a `` China Highlights '' tour 14 days , departing in November and December , to Bejing , Shanghai , Xian Guilin and Hong Kong for $ 2,650 , including airfare from the East Coast . Delta also runs several package tours to European cities : a `` Parisien Spree '' of 6 six nights , breakfasts and a Seine River cruise , for $ 1,199 per person , double occupancy , round-trip from New York , and a `` Romantic Rome '' trip , with similar features , for just $ 1,289 . El Al meanwhile sponsors a spring vacation package that includes five nights ' accommodations in Tel Aviv , daily breakfasts and free rental car , for just $ 1,049 round-trip from New York City . Call your travel agent or IPI at ( 212 ) 953-6010 or El Al Israeli Airlines at ( 800 ) EL AL SUN . Take a long weekend this summer and enjoy one of several two- to four-day walking tours of New York 's historic Hudson Valley from High Land Flings Footloose Holidays . Their `` Dutch Treat '' trip , June 3-5 , follows in the footsteps of colonial settlers through three National Historic landmark villages where stone houses built by Dutch and Huguenot builders in the 17th century still stand . You 'll walk America 's oldest street in New Paltz , Main Street in Hurley and the Stockade area of Kingston , where the state 's constitution was written and adopted , and also visit the 1676 Senate House . Other walks cover the area of Lake Minnewaska , Overlook Mountain near Woodstock and the northeastern Catskills . Prices range from $ 350 per person , double occupancy , for two-day walks to $ 699 for a four-day trip . Call ( 800 ) 453-6665 .
Are frequent-flier awards worth all the trouble travelers sometimes go through to rack up enough miles for a free trip ? Not according to a lengthy piece in the May issue of Worth magazine , which concludes that the programs are vastly over-rated . Then why do so many banks , rental-car companies , long-distance phone services and hotels reward their frequent customers with airline miles rather than cash discounts or other perks ? Simple , says Worth contributing editor Jeff Blyskal , in the article entitled `` The Frequent-Flier Fallacy . '' Companies want to give premiums that combine the greatest perceived value with the lowest possible outlay , and frequent-flier miles are the perfect solution . Each freebie ticket costs an airline only $ 11 to $ 42 , Blyskal calculates . The average discount to passengers amounts to 3.3 percent almost 2 percent less than you get by being a valued customer of Sears , he writes . His data showed the cost to a traveler for each award ranges from $ 929 with Southwest Airlines to $ 7,527 with Delta , which requires higher-than-average mileage minimums to collect a freebie . The dollar value of the freebies ranges from $ 56 with Southwest to $ 208 with United . The effective discounts passengers reap range from 1.5 percent ( USAir ) to 6 percent ( Southwest ) . Hotel frequent-guest programs typically provide a 5 percent discount , as do numerous retailers ' programs , including Sears Best Customer , Blyskal found . The number of dollars spent to earn a domestic freebie usually available after flying 20,000 miles typically ranges from $ 3,626 to $ 6,555 , he said . ( On Southwest Airlines , the average passenger gets a free trip after 7,104 miles because freebies are awarded by that carrier after eight round trips rather than a mileage minimum . ) Blyskal says his accounting system gives airlines the benefit of the doubt in every aspect and was based on the programs as they stand now before the program devaluations most airlines plan starting next year . The payback is even worse from affinity credit cards , he says , which generally award one frequent-flier mile per dollar charged . This translates to an effective discount of just 0.7 percent on $ 20,000 in credit card spending needed to earn the $ 152 in value of the average free ticket , Blyskal figures . All in all , he says , to earn these paltry awards , travelers spend more on air travel in the first place than they have to because they often shun low-cost airlines that do not participate in frequent-flier programs . For example , he says , to earn 20,000 miles on United , a traveler would have to make 14 Newark-Chicago round trips at a cost of $ 12,348 . Fourteen round trips would cost just a quarter of that $ 2,912 on upstart Kiwi International Airlines , which offers consistently low rates but no frequent-flier perks , he says . You say you don't care about the price because your boss pays for a lot of your flights and lets you rake in the resulting frequent-flier perks ? Don't let the company bean-counters get wind of the fact that you could be sent on 45 more Newark-Chicago business trips for what it 's costing to ensure that you get your perk , Blyskal cautions . Add on the annual fees charged for some affinity cards , not to mention high interest on purchases and maybe a computer program to help you manage your miles . And , of course , most travelers who earn a freebie purchase a ticket for their spouse or companion to accompany them which often isn't available at any discount whatsoever . Plus the hardest cost to quantify which may be the biggest cost of all , Blyskal says : the time many fliers spend obsessing over maximizing mileage for minimum payback . His advice ? Focus on service and low fares , not a possible freebie you may never collect .
The State Department is taking a wait-and-see attitude after an American tourist was seriously injured in an attack May 10 by a man with a machete on a remote stretch of beach in the Cayman Islands . The State Department issues information about petty street crime , but not violence , in the Caribbean islands it groups as the British West Indies . `` We 're looking at whether this remains an isolated incidence or if it 's an indication of a threat to other tourists , '' said Gary Sheaffer , department spokesman . At the opposite end of the Caribbean , on the island of Trinidad off the coast of Venezuela , a honeymooning Canadian couple was found beaten and dead on a beach May 11 , with their valuables nearby in their unlocked rental car , a Canadian government spokeswoman confirmed . Trinidadian and Canadian police are still investigating , she said . `` This is the first time this has happened to Canadians in Trinidad . It 's probably a good idea not to frequent deserted beaches , whether it 's Trinidad or Florida , '' said Lely Campbell-Ferreira . Sheaffer said the U.S. . State Department was not aware of the incident . Now you have legroom , now you don't . TWA , which created its much-advertised Comfort Class in coach last year by taking 40 seats out of its cabins , is putting 34 seats back in planes flying its most popular routes this summer . The airline is re-installing the seats on only 10 planes ( the 747-100s ) out of its fleet of 189 `` to meet high market demand '' for the summer , mostly on overseas flights , said spokesman Don Fleming . The rest of the fleet will retain Comfort Class . And TWA will re-evaluate seating in the fall and could very well take the seats out again . Most of the flights with more legs and less room this summer fly out of New York : to Athens , Rome , Madrid , Milan , Paris , New York to St. Louis to Honolulu , one flight daily from New York to Los Angeles and St. Louis to Gatwick , London . Ask about Comfort Class before making a reservation . Buzzwords that Cunard honchos recently bandied about as they described the upcoming $ 45 million refurbishment of the cruise line 's flagship , the Queen Elizabeth 2 , which made its maiden transatlantic voyage in 1969 , were `` enhance '' and `` flow . '' Which translates into opening up more spaces all over the ship : adding a second-story deck promenade to give the Midship Lobby an atriumlike look , eliminating the odd dead-end corridor , redesigning the directional signs ( all `` to enhance passenger flow '' ) and adding a new observation lounge at the rear of the ship with panoramic windows yielding an uninterrupted view . The new art-deco- , neo-classical-inspired decor will be ripe with texture , replete with marble , resounding in architectural detail and rich in earthtones , all `` enhanced '' with the QE2 's memorabilia , such as old charts and lots of regal art . All 900 cabins will be refurbished and all bathrooms rebuilt . Ditto on restaurants , where quality of service will , of course , be `` enhanced . '' The refurbishment will commence Nov. 30 and take about 30 days , Cunard officials said . So will all this `` enhance '' prices ? `` The cost of cruising has never gone down , '' noted Navin Sawnhey , senior vice president of marketing . The QE2 now offers a range of fares and cruises , with its transatlantic voyage priced from $ 1,395 to $ 10,745 , per person , double , with return air travel . You can't party all night long in Greece anymore . Nightclubs , bars and restaurants formerly with all-night entertainment now must close by 2:30 a.m. in summer , 2 a.m. in winter and 3:30 a.m. on Saturday . So you will not be sleepless in Seattle , the Seattle-King County Visitors Bureau is operating a free reservation service : ( 800 ) 535-7071 . A new service offers travelers a fax mailbox to retrieve stored faxes with any machine by calling a toll-free number in the United States . For rate info , call AlphaNet Telecom at ( 212 ) 932-1554 .
I think there are several reasons why , in polite company , we rarely talk about our discharges . I mention this in connection with endorphins , which , I notice , people have begun to discuss with relative strangers , just the way people formerly discussed their cholesterol at parties . Do you remember that ? Outwardly normal person : `` Do you know what my cholesterol was last week ? Myself : `` Sir , I do not . '' Outwardly normal person : `` It was ( mentions very good cholesterol count ) . '' Myself : `` That is good . '' Outwardly normal person : `` What , you don't believe me ? '' Myself : `` I say no such thing . '' Outwardly normal person : `` If there 's a problem here , I know a medical lab that 's open until 8 . We 'll take my Q45 and I 'll get re-tested and you can see exactly what my cholesterol is . '' I was never sure about how to participate in these conversations , because , first of all , I would never say `` my cholesterol . '' My creed is that cholesterol belongs to the universe or the Great Spirit . We 're just borrowing it for a little while . Which raises a question : Let 's say you do get your cholesterol down . Where does it go ? Is it just out there , sticking to the faces of babies in perambulators and gumming up the wings of the great-crested kingfisher ? Now it is endorphins . Endorphins are a sore subject with me , because I 'm pretty sure I don't have any . Other people do , and sometimes they seem to be bragging about them . `` I was up on the Nordic Combat machine last night , and I had it set at level eight , which simulates hand-to-hand combat with a huge , grunting , mead-addled Hun . Boy , after 45 minutes , those endorphins were really flowing . '' The idea is that endorphins are chemicals that , under certain circumstances , begin squirting out of somewhere inside your head and making your brain feel better . I picture the system as comparable to those nozzles in highly evolved produce sections , where a soothing mist sighs out over the kale and the arugula , like the strange fogs that gather ' round Ben Bulben 's bare head . I have been known to tarry there for extra moments , watching the wet shades and phantoms dance over the ruby swiss chard . Endorphins are supposed to calm the mind and kill pain and produce peak experiences , such as the `` runner 's high . '' I have never had a runner 's high or a swimmer 's high or any particular reaction to strenuous exercise except the keen sense of how exhausted I was and how eager I was to stop swimming or running . And I know full well that my brain is a tightly wired network of fright sensors , discomfort gauges and humming monitors of self-concern . There is nothing up there that coats my fevered mind in soothing syrup , and even if there were it would just short everything out . So maybe I don't have endorphins , but even if I did , would I mention them ? My normal assumption is that there is no widespread appetite for information about my secretions . `` My gall bladder was on the job yesterday afternoon . I was pumping some big-time bile , emulsifying those fats in my duodenum . Bless my soul . '' To the endorphin-proud , I am often tempted to point out that one theory about endorphins is that they were originally bestowed upon animals , such as cats , for whom sex is excruciatingly painful . They were a little payoff , nature 's way of saying , `` Thanks for perpetuating the species even though that felt like being probed by a briar patch . '' Under those circumstances , I maintain that the civilized course is to live with pain and terror . If things get intolerable , there 's always the option of scootching the chicory aside and lying down for a while next to the red leaf lettuce .
By conventional wisdom , there are certain things you simply don't do , right ? You don't drink on an empty stomach . You don't spit into the wind and , of course , you never escort the bride 's father to the bachelor party . But for parents of young children , one don't has always outdistanced all the rest . You don't go to Disney World during school holidays . People who have disobeyed this commandment litter Orlando like lost souls , their hollow eyes bespeaking the drubbing they have taken at the Tourist Capital of the Universe . Their children drag behind , in tears , muttering , `` We 'll be good now , Daddy . We promise . Please. Can we wait two more hours on another line ? '' School holidays at Disney World are crowded with a capital C , chaos with , well , a capital K . The lines are legendary , the sun is hot and the living uneasy . But I did it . I survived . I even had a good time , and you can , too even if you visit at a peak period , such as the three summer months . All you have to do is follow some simple advice , which I 'm sharing on the condition that you don't go blabbing it to all the neighbors . Because the secret here is to go where they ISn't and , believe you me , at Disney , an incautious word about an empty attraction can turn the Road Less Traveled into a Superhighway faster than you can say Jiminy Cricket . Rule No. 1 , then , is plan ahead . This trite little maxim will seem biblical in depth when you 've watched The Unprepared spin out of control like weather vanes in the wind . I myself had envisioned being a bit laid back about the whole affair until I mentioned my vacation to a few friends : `` I 'm planning on bringing the wife and my 5-year-old daughter down to Disney World this Easter . '' They looked at me as if I were a few sandwiches short of a picnic . That 's when I finally realized that you don't approach Disney World like a visit to an amusement park . You approach it like the invasion of a small country . Think of it as the Duchy of Grand Fenwick and begin preparing your counterattack on the Mouse That Roared . Of course , if you are a Zen master , and view crowds as a natural event , like waves in the ocean , skip ahead to Tip No. 2 . But the rest of you , buy a guide book and start reading . Otherwise you will be trampled by those who know that you have to be at Dumbo by 10 a.m. to avoid an hour 's wait . If you don't believe me , listen to Bob Sehingler , whose guide to Disneyland I manage to find and use . `` It 's easy to spot the free spirits at Disneyland , '' he wrote , `` particularly at opening time . While everybody else is stampeding to Splash Mountain or Star Tours , they are the ones standing in a cloud of dust puzzling over the park map . Later , they are the people running around like chickens in a thunderstorm trying to find an attraction with less than a forty-minute wait . '' Convinced ? Then make sure you abide by Rule No.2 . Get up early . How early ? Sick early . Dawn is too late at Disney World . One morning our wake-up call at the Grand Floridian , a Disney hotel , came at 5:45 a.m. . The hotel operator couldn't help laughing at me . It was pitch black outside . The drunks still hadn't gotten home . But you know what ? There were plenty of people ahead of us when we boarded the monorail for the Magic Kingdom at 6:30 a.m. , taking advantage of a 90-minute early opening for Disney Resort guests . ( Begin optional trim ) Up Main Street we streamed , past street lamps still lit from the night before . Everyone tried so hard to pretend they weren't running . It looked like a huge trial heat for the Olympic walking team . All that paranoia paid off , however . In the next hour we were able to board four or five rides that had been swamped the previous afternoon . One hour after the parks open to the general public , major attractions have major lines . At Space Mountain , Splash Mountain and Thunder Mountain Railroad in the Magic Kingdom , Spaceship Earth in Epcot and Star Tours at MGM , you can expect a line of at least half an hour . At Dumbo , forget it . This dinky little ride featuring that darling little elephant draws children like flies . I waited 45 minutes one day for a 45-second ride . If you have to ride rides in the afternoon , try to do so during parade times , when lines go from maddening to manageable . ( End optional trim ) To make the trip back to the hotel as painless as possible , however , remember Rule No. 3 . Stay as close as possible to the parks . This can seem silly when the Budgetbear Hotel 10 miles away is offering Hoedown Weekend at five bucks a night . Believe me , that will not seem like a bargain for long . After becoming disgusted at the honky tonk sprawl that sprung up around Disneyland , Father Disney decreed it would not happen again . So Disney World is surrounded by virgin acres . The trip to the Magic Kingdom from the highway is itself a five-mile ride , complete with tollbooth . Then you have to take a tram to the booths to buy tickets and then a boat ride to an admissions gate , and then you have to traverse Main Street USA to get to any real rides . This can be an exhausting experience . You can avoid a lot of the hassle by staying in one of the Disney hotels , which run the gamut from reasonable to ridiculous in price . Disney resort guests not only receive free transportation to the parks but also enjoy the early opening times . And resort guests never have to worry about the parking lots closing . ( Begin optional trim ) We stayed at the Grand Floridian , Disney 's deluxe hotel , which is but a five-minute monorail ride from the Magic Kingdom and about 20 minutes by monorail or bus from Epcot and MGM . The Floridian set us back about $ 350 a night . But my theory was that , on a day when the crowds make me retreat to my room , it would be best if the room did not look like a small cell at Rikers Island . The Floridian delivered most of what I wanted from a luxury hotel . It reminded me of the racetrack at Saratoga all red turrets and Victorian balustrades after Mary Poppins had taken over and banned all the betting . Very clean . Very proper . Lots of people in knickers . Our room was large , salmon in color and nicely furnished . ( End optional trim ) At some point you just have to get away from the crowds , sit down , eat and relax . Arranging that is something of a feat , however , in peak periods when lines for a simple soda may stretch back to bygone days . One way to beat the problem is to apply Rule No. 4 . Book restaurants early . Resort guests can book up to three days in advance ; others up to one day . Tip No. 5 . Be flexible . Some things you just cannot plan . Rides break down . People have strange reactions to food and find themselves , as my daughter calls it , `` disembarfing . '' You just have to deal with it .
Leonard Bernstein once scoffed at the notion that there is such a thing as a single , ideal , unimprovable musical interpretation of a piece of music . We should be similarly skeptical of the proposition , already put forward by a few early reviewers , that Humphrey Burton 's fat new biography of Bernstein is somehow `` definitive . '' Definitive it 's not , both because the idea itself is meaningless and because the life in question is too complex and too recently ended to be definitively written about . The nearly-600-page `` Leonard Bernstein '' can , however , make this considerable , if limited , claim : It 's the best we have so far . The book is dutiful , exhaustive ( sometimes to a fault ) , respectful without being fawning . And to deal quickly with an issue that all Lenny fans will be unworthily wondering about , it handles Bernstein 's complicated sexual life a sort of strenuous omnisexuality , it seems , with a steady pull toward homosexuality in an unblinking but decently compassionate way . On the other hand , the book is not very excitingly written and could have benefited from some tighter editing . It 's a portrait , a sketch , written by a longtime friend a TV producer , not a musician who 's smart , unsentimental , who has had access to piles of important letters . And such letters ! Tender , hope-filled youthful notes to Aaron Copland , or his parents ; letters of euphoria and gratitude to his early mentor Serge Koussevitzky at the Boston Symphony Orchestra ; letters of steadily rising confidence to his lifelong confidante , Helen Coates ; letters of almost unbearable conflict to his finacee and later wife , Felicia , as the desperate-to-be-loved Bernstein gropes with the for him especially problematic possibilities of marriage and monogamy . Burton gently debunks a few press-agent Lennyisms that have wafted unchallenged into the general consciousness . One of these concerns Bernstein 's supposed roots in jazz . Unlike , say , Andre Previn , who is a certifiable jazz man , Bernstein was really not steeped in the tradition , a fact that Burton addresses crisply : `` Bernstein 's knowledge of jazz was cheerful and enthusiastic but essentially superficial . Jazz musicians never thought much of his gifts as an improviser . '' Burton also calls attention to Bernstein 's dainty total output as a composer , a fact that Bernstein himself often rued later in life . Burton points out that between 1957 , after `` West Side Story ' ' opened , and 1971 , when his `` Mass '' had its premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington , Bernstein managed just two works : the `` Kaddish '' Symphony and `` Chichester Psalms . '' The two works together total less than an hour of music . Burton also offers a brief but instructive and clarifying view of the infamous 1969 party for the Black Panthers , held at the Bernstein apartment on New York 's Park Avenue . Tom Wolfe 's subsequent New York Magazine piece about the party coined the smug term `` radical chic '' and tried to offer Bernstein as a comical , desperate figure , or , as Burton paraphrases it , a `` naive bumbler who hobnobbed with terrorists . '' The important , often overlooked truth was that it was Felicia 's party , and Lenny merely staggered into it . That Wolfe 's piece , which looks increasingly weak and smart-alecky as the years go by , was able to create such a stir is testimony to the then-novelty of what has since become a journalistic commonplace : the sanctimonious , questionably motivated trashing of the famous . The book 's treatment of Bernstein 's last years publicly lionized , privately an impulsive , reckless widower is touching . We feel the regret , the self-doubt , the overextended emotional resources , but also , finally , the greatness , a verdict that had long been withheld in some quarters but which by the end had become nearly unamimous . Burton 's book gives us , in sum , the first real full-length , intellectually worthy picture of Bernstein the man endearing , effusive , exasperating , irreplaceable . It 's a man who gave classical music a humanity it needed and still needs , a man to whom a friend could send a telegram on the occasion of Lenny 's first audience with the pope that read in its entirety : `` REMEMBER : THE RING , NOT THE LIPS . ''
Big guns John Grisham and Tom Clancy are weighing in with new beach books . So are Peter Benchley , Cormac McCarthy , Edna O' Brien , E.L. Doctorow and Ken Kesey . Here 's a look at the major fiction due out this summer . Some books may be in stores before their official publication date . A young lawyer takes up the case of a Klansman on death row in John Grisham 's `` The Chamber '' ( Doubleday ) . Late May . Something scary is lurking off the Connecticut shore , but what is it and why is it killing people ? The answers lie in `` White Shark '' ( Random House ) , the latest don't-go-near-the-water thriller by Peter Benchley ( `` Jaws , '' `` Beast '' ) . June . Cormac McCarthy 's `` The Crossing '' ( Knopf ) is the second book in a projected Western trilogy that began with the best-selling `` All the Pretty Horses . '' An escaped IRA terrorist finds sanctuary in a remote house outside an Irish village inhabited by a widow in Edna O' Brien 's `` House of Splendid Isolation '' ( Farrar Straus Giroux ) . `` The Waterworks '' ( Random House ) , E.L. Doctorow 's newest historical novel , is set in Gilded-Age New York . The timing sounds perfect for this satire : In Christopher Buckley 's `` Thank You for Smoking '' ( Random House ) , a PR man for the tobacco industry is targeted by an anti-smoking zealot . Someone is killing Oklahoma 's state legislators in `` Fine Lines '' ( Random House ) , the sixth One-Eyed Mack mystery by PBS 's Jim Lehrer . A man who is actually a vampire kills the childhood enemies of his best friend in David ( `` Lie to Me '' ) Martin 's `` Tap Tap '' ( Random House ) . In Robert B . Parker 's new Spenser mystery , `` Walking Shadow '' ( Putnam ) , the Boston P.I. investigates a murder at a small repertory theater . `` Black Betty '' ( Norton ) is the new Easy Rawlins mystery by Walter Mosley , whose fans include Bill Clinton . Actress Meg Tilly makes her writing debut in `` Singing Songs '' ( Dutton ) , a coming-of-age novel about a girl trapped in a dysfunctional family . `` Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights '' ( Hyperion ) , a novel about a black firefighter , is Susan Straight 's follow-up to `` I Been in Sorrow 's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots . '' July . Ken Kesey ( with Ken Babbs ) has written a historical novel about the 1911 battle for the World Championship Broncbusting title in `` Last Go Round : A Dime Western '' ( Viking ) . `` Generations of Winter '' by Vassily Aksyonov ( Random House ) follows the fortunes of one Moscow family from 1928-1945 . Actor-turned-best-selling-author Kirk Douglas is back with a new novel , `` Last Tango in Brooklyn '' ( Warner ) , the story of a May-December romance . `` The Gift '' by Danielle Steel ( Delacorte ) is set in the Midwest in the 1950s . `` Rare and Endangered Species '' by Richard Bausch ( Houghton Mifflin ) is a collection of short stories by the author of `` Rebel Powers . '' `` The Unicorn Hunt '' ( Knopf ) is the fifth installment in Dorothy Dunnett 's saga of Nicholas van der Poele in 15th-century Europe . `` Arise and Walk '' by Barry Gifford ( Hyperion ) is a novel of feminist revenge by the author of `` Wild at Heart . '' Alan Sternberg 's `` Camaro City '' ( Harcourt Brace ) is a collection of stories about a Connecticut factory town that has lost its factories . `` Shear '' by Tim Parks ( Grove Press ) is a new novel of psychological suspense by the author of `` Juggling the Stars . '' Yet another actor , Stephen Collins , has decided to try his luck at fiction with `` Eye Contact '' ( Bantam ) , about an actress suspected of murder . August . Jack Ryan is called out of retirement to serve as the new president 's national security adviser as trouble brews in Japan in Tom Clancy 's `` Debt of Honor '' ( Putnam ) . Carol Higgins Clark , daughter of suspense queen Mary Higgins Clark , has written a new Regan Reilly mystery called `` Iced '' ( Warner ) . Paul Auster 's `` Mr. Vertigo '' ( Viking ) is a novel of 1920s and '30s America . Bill Maher , host of Comedy Central 's `` Politically Incorrect , '' has written a book about five aspiring comics in the mid- '70s called `` True Story : A Comedy Novel '' ( Random House ) . Thomas Mallon ( `` Aurora 7 '' ) re-creates the story of Henry and Clara Rathbone , the young couple who sat in President Lincoln 's theater box the night he was assassinated , in `` Henry and Clara '' ( Ticknor & Fields ) . `` Dixie City Jam '' by James Lee Burke ( Hyperion ) reprises Dave Robicheaux from `` In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead . ''
Is `` Goodnight Moon '' making you loony ? Does the phrase , `` And a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush , '' run ' round your brain like some Lite Mixed Variety tune piped into the dentist 's office ? Maybe it 's time to experiment with some new bedtime fare . Oh , don't desert the great green room of Margaret Wise Brown 's classic . Just supplement `` Goodnight Moon '' with some other books that have a going-to-bed theme . Here are a few of the newer ones : My favorite is `` Good Night , Gorilla , '' by Peggy Rathman ( G.P. Putnam 's Sons , $ 12.95 , 36 pages , ages 1-4 ) . After sharing it with a giggling toddler , you 'll wonder why more picture books don't have a sense of humor . The text is incredibly simple . A sleepy zoo keeper is making his last round , saying `` good night '' to each of the animals as he walks past the cages . First on his route is the gorilla , which surreptitiously snatches the key ring from the zoo keeper 's belt . The gorilla unlocks his cage and follows the keeper through the zoo . As soon as the keeper says , `` Good night , Elephant , '' the gorilla uses a color-coded key to release the elephant . The same thing happens with the lion , hyena , giraffe and armadillo , who fall into line behind the gorilla . Soon they 're all tiptoeing behind the keeper as he walks to his house , opens the door and heads down the hall to his bedroom . When he climbs into bed next to his sleeping wife , she stirs and says , `` Good night , dear . '' Imagine her surprise when each of the animals , curling up for the night in her bedroom , responds , `` Good night . '' On the next page , actually a double-page spread of inky black , all we see are the whites of her frightened eyes . She flips on the light , and the animals flash sheepish grins her way . But she gets up and leads them back to their cages anyway . Everyone settles into the right cage the elephant with his Babar doll , the armadillo with his stuffed Ernie from Sesame Street . Everyone , that is , except gorilla . Kids will cheer his great escape , sensing that it just might be a nightly occurrence . `` Good Night ! '' written by Claire Masurel , illustrated by Marie H. Henry ( Chronicle , $ 12.95 , 32 pages , ages 2-6 ) is about nighttime rituals . As a little girl gets ready for bed , she gathers up all her dolls and stuffed animals . There is no doubt who 's in charge . `` Silly Oscar , '' she tells the clown doll . `` It 's not time to play cards ! It 's time to go to bed . '' Her stuffed dragon can't watch any more TV . Her rag doll can't read any more books . This little girl is giving the orders , and kids will enjoy sharing her sense of empowerment . When dogs dream , their legs pumping like pistons , are they catching squirrels and nabbing rabbits ? Naw. `` Dreaming '' by Bobette McCarthy ( Candlewick Press , $ 12.95 , 32 pages , ages 3 and up ) stars a salty dog who dreams of sailing the ocean blue . His wicker bed is transformed into a rowboat : Awash and away , I drift through the night , Through mizzle and moonlight , Through darkness , through light . Eventually he drifts back to the seaside home of his human family , where a little boy has been waiting for him to wake up . There 's nothing like cuddling up with your kid to read a slow , sleepy story , and then waking up three hours later cramped in the corner of her twin bed , a book on your nose and a crick in your neck . Kids who live for those nights when they outlast their parents will enjoy `` A Quiet Night In , '' by Jill Murphy ( Candlewick Press , $ 12.95 , 32 pages , ages 3 and up ) . The Larges a family of elephants that debuted in Murphy 's `` Five Minutes ' Peace '' are celebrating Mr . Large 's birthday . Mrs . Large gets all the children ready for bed early so she and Mr . Large can enjoy a quiet dinner by candlelight . But before they retire , the kids talk Dad into reading them a story . He conks out , and they persuade Mom to finish the book . She 's snoring a few pages later , and the kids are quite happy to tuck her in next to Dad on the couch . After all , Mom and Dad did want a quiet night in .
Llamas will carry the load on a three-day guided hiking and camping trip in the Chugach Mountains just east of Anchorage , Alaska , beginning Sept. 16 . Each hiker will have his or her own llama to carry a tent , sleeping bag and pad , personal items and backcountry cooking supplies to the Williwaw Lakes area , normally ablaze in color and ripe blueberries in September . The hiking pace is relaxed , with time for photography and nature study . Meals are cooked by guides , using fresh ingredients at campsites . Cost : $ 375 per person including all camping supplies , meals and llamas . Not included : air fare to Anchorage and shuttle service to the trail head . Contact : Llama Buddies Expeditions , P.O. . Box 874995 , Wasilla , Alaska 99687-4995 ; telephone ( 907 ) 376-8472 . -0- A six-day road trip for baseball fans begins Aug. 23 in Boston at the Copley Square Hotel , from which participants leave for an evening game in Fenway Park . The next day , sports buffs motor-coach to Cooperstown , N.Y. , to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame . The trip continues with two games at Yankee Stadium in New York , one at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia and one at Camden Yards in Baltimore , with motor-coach transportation from site to site . Participants eat at local restaurants . Cost : $ 675 per person , double occupancy including game tickets , hotels , ground transportation and guide . Not included : all meals and air fare to Boston and from Baltimore . Contact : Sports Tours Inc. , P.O. Box 84 , Hatfield , Mass. 01038 ; tel . ( 800 ) 722-7701 . -0- For fans of Southern history , horses , antiques and regional architecture , two five-day bicycling trips through the heart of Kentucky 's Bluegrass Country leave Lexington on Oct. 16 and 23 . Cycling is on traffic-free back roads with gentle terrain for riders of any ability . Participants stop at Kentucky Horse Park and Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill , and tour Harrodsburg , Kentucky 's oldest town . Participants spend nights in antique-furnished inns along the way and eat traditional Kentucky cooking . Cost : $ 1,045 per person , double occupancy , including lodging , meals and snacks , van support and guides . Not included : bike rental ( $ 109 ) and round-trip air fare . Contact : Backroads , 1516 Fifth St. , Suite PR84 , Berkeley 94710-1740 ; tel . ( 800 ) 462-2848 . -0- A 49-day around-South America cruise aboard the 729-passenger Regent Sea will depart Ft . Lauderdale , Fla. , on Oct. 14 . Passengers will witness the total solar eclipse of Nov. 3 off the coast of Brazil , near Rio de Janeiro . Guest scientists aboard ship will lecture and discuss the eclipse , the constellation known as the Southern Cross and the so-called Magellanic Clouds . Participants also will see Antarctic glaciers , the Strait of Magellan , Chilean fiords and the Andes Mountains , before transiting the Panama Canal . Some stops on the tour will include St. Thomas , in the U.S. Virgin Islands ; Barbados ; Santiago , Chile , and Lima , Peru . Cost : $ 5,442 from Los Angeles , including all meals and ship facilities . Not included : gratuities , port charges and optional land excursion costs . Contact : Regency Cruises , 260 Madison Ave. , New York 10016 ; tel . ( 212 ) 972-4499 . -0- ECLIPSE IN BOLIVIA A six-day , land-based eclipse-viewing trip to Bolivia leaves Miami for La Paz on Oct. 31 . Tour members stay at a downtown hotel in the Bolivian capital and take leisurely tours of the city including the Witches ' Market . An all-night train trip to the `` center line '' of the eclipse 's course , between Sevaruyo and Rio Mulatos , follows . A box dinner will be provided on the train , but no sleeping accommodations . After the eclipse , participants will continue by train to the small village of Huatajata on the shores of Lake Titicaca for an overnight at the Hotel Inca Utama , then cruise by hydrofoil to Copacabana , Sun and Suriqui islands before returning to La Paz . Cost : $ 1,695 per person , double occupancy , including round-trip air fare from Miami , hotels , trains , sightseeing and most meals . Not included : air fare from Los Angeles to Miami . Contact : Travel Bug International , P.O. . Box 178247 , San Diego 92177-8247 ; tel . ( 800 ) 247-1900 .
Considering that the United Nations has recently created a Bosnian war-crimes tribunal , Joseph Persico 's `` Nuremberg '' could hardly have arrived at a more opportune moment . Persico , who is the author of a fine biography of William Casey , displays sleuthing skills worthy of the former CIA director in tracing the course of the trial that sought to establish a basis for prosecuting international atrocities . This is no dry-as-dust account , but a vivid reconstruction of the actions of the wartime Allies and the Nazi elite at Nuremberg . Using the private papers of the Nuremberg prison psychiatrist , the letters and journals of prisoners , and accounts of the battles between the prosecutors and judges , Persico easily carries us into a deeper understanding of the trials . Persico 's book does suggest that justice at Nuremberg will remain a noble idea murdered by a gang of ugly facts . The United States designed the trials in the heady days after World War II . Nuremberg was to signal not only the triumph of superior might , but also the victory of superior morality . Like the United Nations and the World Bank , the Nuremberg trials were an integral part of the postwar new world order that the wise men of the American establishment attempted to create after 1945 . Today the Un ited States lacks the confidence and the United Nations the power to realize that dream . The menace of a loaded gun remains more potent than a diplomatic brief . Still , the great merit of Persico 's book is to remind us that the undertaking itself was a success . Nuremberg 's most significant accomplishment was to confront the German people with crimes planned and perpetrated by the Nazis . Unlike World War I , the Germans could not seek refuge in the myth of a stab in the back . The trials showed that they had stabbed themselves in the back . Some of the most fascinating passages in Persico 's book center on the responses of the Nazi ringleaders to the overwhelming evidence of concentration camps and mass shootings introduced at the trials . One of the most odious cases was that of the former Nazi governor-general of Poland , Hans Frank . In order to overcompensate for his partly Jewish ancestry , Frank became one of the most fervent anti-Semites among the Nazis . So determined was Frank to prove his loyalty to Nazism that he had all of his rema rks condemning the Jews , and boasting of exploiting 1.3 million Poles for forced labor , recorded for posterity . Frank 's voluminous records would form one of the key sources for the Nuremberg prosecutors . At the trials , Frank veered between acknowledging and repudiating guilt for his crimes . Hermann Goering , by contrast , mustered up his old bravado . Goering , whose outsized personality made him a favorite with the American GIs , managed to bully most of his fellow defendants into refusing to plead guilty . Indeed , Persico shows that under cross-examination the cunning Goering even got the upper hand over his famous American prosecutor , Robert Jackson . Goering managed to cheat the hangman as well . Persico , who seeks to clear up the mystery surrounding Goering 's suicide , argues that upon enter ing prison Goering secreted a cyanide capsule in his luggage and persuaded a member of the prison staff to take pieces of luggage from the baggage room for him . Perhaps the most sinister figure at the trial was the cultivated technocrat Albert Speer , one of the few in the dock who received a jail term rather than a death sentence . Though Speer used millions of foreign workers as slave labor , he managed to shift responsibility onto his boorish subordinate Fritz Sauckel . By taking the blame for Nazism in the broadest sense but avoiding any particulars , Speer managed to tell the judges what they wanted to be told . Speer portrayed the Nazis as embodying the dange rs of a military technology that would pose even greater dangers to humanity in the future . As Persico puts it , Speer presented himself to the court `` not as a man pleading for his life , but as one who had something valuable to tell them , someone with a vision born of redemption after immersion in evil . '' Indeed , as Speer had correctly calculated , his contrition contrasted starkly with the stonewalling of his colleagues . In the teeth of the evidence , Generals Jodl and Keitel denied culpability for the atrocities on the Eastern front . The foppish foreign minister Joachim Ribbentrop claimed that Germany had merely emulated America 's occupation of the New World . Persico , who illuminates the pitiful character of most of the Nazi leadership , does not draw the obvious conclusion that there was nothing particularly exceptional about the character of most of Hitler 's henchmen . Ordinary men committed extraordinary crimes . In that sense , the spirit of Nuremberg lives on in Bosnia .
Helyar ( Villard , $ 24 ; 576 pages ) . Hyman is a sports reporter for the Baltimore Sun Reviewed by Mark Hyman ( c ) 1994 , The Baltimore Sun If John Helyar winds up on the best seller list with `` Lords of the Realm : The Real History of Baseball , '' it will be for the anecdotes . Exhibit A : As an infant players union is taking shape in 1967 , its new leader , Marvin Miller , calls a meeting and instructs players to write down their most serious grievances with the owners . Pitcher Milt Pappas , a former Baltimore Oriole , spoke for his colleagues firmly in the grip of the mod generation . `` There aren't enough outlets for hair dryers in the clubhouses , '' he thundered . Exhibit B : William D. Eckert , retired one-star general , briefly baseball commissioner in the late 1960s and early '70s , had a remarkable penchant for confusing people and events . A notoriously passionless public speaker , Eckert once began delivering remarks to an audience of baseball officials before realizing the speech was intended for the Retired Airline Pilots Association . Exhibit C : Charles O . Finley ran a cut-rate front office in his final years of owning the Oakland A's . By 1978 , the entire operation was down to six people , including a 16-year-old office assistant named Stanley Burrell . Burrell has since changed his name to MC Hammer , the rap star , now called just plain Hammer . Helyar 's book is rich with such stories . But it 's clearly more than a collection of quotable quotes and front-office trivia . Instead , what Helyar offers is surely one of the most complete and provocative histories ever written of major-league baseball as it has played out in owners ' suites and across the collective bargaining table . It 's a tad intimidating at 576 pages , but considering he begins with Elysian Fields in the 1840s , and carries the story through the sale of the Orioles last fall to Peter G. Angelos , the book is anything but long-winded . A word about Helyar : He may not be as familiar to readers of sports books as Pete Golenbock or John Feinstein , who between them have covered every topic but the secret world of stadium ushers . But Helyar 's credentials are substantial . His `` Barbarians at the Gate '' was a big best seller . He has built a reputation as a solid reporter covering sports business issues for The Wall Street Journal . In this book , Helyar tells his story , in part , as he profiles some of baseball 's most influential and , when the author is through , least likable characters . In the process , more than a few myths are exploded . ( Begin optional trim ) For instance , he sheds a different sort of light on Kenesaw Mountain Landis , the iron-willed judge credited with bringing baseball back from the brink after the 1919 Black Sox scandal . Helyar has discovered more : `` Under Landis , the morals of baseball were purified and the business of baseball was ossified . '' Landis , he writes , was among the least progressive men of his day . He said no to lights at Crosley Field in Cincinnati , vowing there would be no night baseball in the big leagues in his lifetime . He said no to a beer company that wanted to buy advertising on World Series radio broadcasts . If it was new , Landis said no . Other notables appear equally as unsympathetic in Helyar 's narrative . The list is lengthy , and includes former baseball commissioners Peter Ueberroth and Bowie Kuhn and former owners led by the pre-eminent owner of his generation , Walter O' Malley of the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers . The miracle of Ueberroth is that he lasted as long in the job as he did , given he barely could hide his contempt for the owners . `` He treated them like retarded children , '' says a lawyer , unnamed , quoted by Helyar . ( End optional trim ) If there is a hero in the story , it is Miller , the man who brought the players union into the 20th century , who stared down the owners , broke the reserve clause and paved the way for today 's million-dollar salaries . Predictably , the owners despised him and , in Helyar 's telling , spent years calling him a collection of names , not all fit for this newspaper . This book is not always satisfying . For all its thoroughness , it uncovers few important news stories . There 's also the issue of sourcing . Helyar writes in a seamless , tightly organized style more like a technothriller than a nonfiction baseball book . In the preface Helyar provides a list of baseball folk who cooperated with his reporting . What 's missing is something more substantial that connects facts to the sources from which the author pulled them . As a newspaper guy , he should see the value in that .
The travel agent is as close as most tourists ever get to a free lunch . At no cost to you , an agent can recommend and book your vacation , often drawing on special expertise and firsthand travel experience in making recommendations . Find a good one and your life is simplified . But no lunch is truly free . The problem with many of the roughly 32,000 travel agencies in the United States is that agents ' attentions are claimed by computerized reservation systems , airline fare wars , and fluctuations in the commissions they are paid by lodgings and airlines . That often leaves agents without time to learn geography in detail or see many destinations themselves . Sensing an opening there , a new breed of travel consultants has developed . They specialize in a certain area and reject the title `` travel agent '' as an understatement of their expertise . Some make bookings , some don't . Some accept commissions , some don't . Most interview customers about their preferences and interests , then come back with itinerary proposals that touch on lodgings , dining , cultural attractions and entertainment . Unlike travel agents , these consultants charge consumers upfront for their service . Their prices can be daunting as much as $ 70 an hour but they can deliver a service highly prized by travelers with less time than money . Regional expertise is one advantage . Also , for those consultants who reject commissions taking their fees only from the client their advice may be less influenced by monetary considerations , and more likely to be `` pure . '' Here are a handful of such companies , listed by their territories : ( Begin optional trim ) California . Perfect Weekends ( 2059 Camden Ave. , Suite 186 , San Jose , Calif. 95124 ; tel. 800-493-3536 or 408-559-3652 ) . Susan Barton opened San Jose-based Perfect Weekends in June , 1993 , aiming to match busy travelers with B&Bs around the state . In the 11 months since , she says , she has booked more than 400 trips . Barton charges $ 99 to plan a one-destination trip , and presumes that most of her customers will be driving . She books lodgings , makes meal reservations , schedules lessons or rentals and often builds weekends around special events . ( End optional trim ) American West . Off the Beaten Path ( 109 E . Main St. , Bozeman , Mont. 59715 ; tel. 406-586-1311 , fax 406-587-4147 ) . Pam and Bill Bryan , both trained environmentalists and tour guides , started the firm in 1987 , specializing in outdoorsy trips to Arizona , New Mexico , Utah , Colorado , Wyoming , Idaho , Montana and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta . In 1993 , Bill Bryan estimates , the company arranged trips for about 570 individuals , couples and groups , with activities such as fishing , skiing , riding , hiking and canoeing . Fees for planning generally run $ 70 an hour , with a minimum of four or eight hours , depending on the complexity of the trip . Customers get detailed itineraries , plane tickets and maps . England . Oh to Be in England .. . ( 2 Charlton St. , New York , N.Y. 10014 ; tel. 212- 255-8739 , fax 212-986-8365 ) . Jennifer Dorn , an administrator at New York University 's law school and frequent traveler to England , set up her business four years ago . She doesn't make bookings ( she advises travelers to make reservations themselves or use a travel agent ) , but fills spiral-bound notebooks with itinerary recommendations . A typical trip takes her about 10 hours to plan . In the last year , she estimates that she haa done about 150 itineraries for $ 150- $ 225 , depending on the number of cities in the itinerary . France . Point of View . ( 5922 Melvin Ave. , Tarzana , Calif. 91356 ; tel. 818-705-4418 , fax 818-708-7131 ) . Kajsa Agostini was born in France and spent 15 years with the French Government Tourist Office in California before striking off on her own last year . Agostini does not make bookings , but interviews travelers and devises an itinerary . Once the itinerary is booked , Agostini often writes to hotels to confirm reservations and ensure personalized service . She charges about $ 200 . Italy . Marjorie Shaw 's Insider 's Italy ( P.O. Box 021816A , Brooklyn , N.Y. 11202-1816 ; tel. 718-855-3878 , fax 718-855-3687 . ) Shaw , who was born in Rome and lived in Italy for more than a decade , started her consulting business in 1988 after spending four years leading walking tours through the country . Shaw maintains an office in Rome . Her databank of Italian intelligence includes roughly 400 small hotels throughout the country . She makes hotel and transportation bookings and gives clients a portfolio that runs as long as 85 pages . Her typical fee for a couple on a two-week trip with four stops : $ 495 . ( If Shaw doesn't answer her phone , she 's on a fact-finding trip ; fax or call back later . )
When I first got off the Pennsylvania Turnpike at Morgantown , I barely glanced at the horse and buggy two-stepping along ahead of me in morning traffic . How nice , I thought carriage rides for tourists . But then I started spotting buggies hitched outside pharmacies , hardware stores and other everyday businesses on two-lane Route 23 . They really were a normal means of transportation in these parts . There are tourist rides , too , all right . And loads of pseudo-Pennsylvania Dutch attractions throughout rural Lancaster County . But beyond the `` Amishland '' commercialism , a sizable community of Plain People remarkably still flourishes much as it has for 300 years largely without benefit of automobiles , electricity and other trappings of modern life . By avoiding the main routes especially kitschy U.S. 30 visitors can glimpse the old-fashioned lifestyle of the Amish without feeling like intruders . Meander along the byways and you 'll crisscross fields that inspire the designs of exquisite patchwork quilts and see farmers walking behind plows pulled by mules . Women in bonnets tend their kitchen gardens and children with Dutch cuts skip-ride home from school on old-fashioned wooden scooters . Small home-based shops display first-rate yet inexpensive local crafts , and roadside stands sell garden-fresh produce and mouth-watering baked goods . Lancaster might well be the Comfort Food Capital of the universe , embodying the familiar aura one restaurant localizes as `` Mom and shoo-fly pie . '' Countless places feature inexpensive food that invigorates the term home cooking . Virtually everything is made from scratch : crispy potato chips , crusty rolls , tangy condiments and flaky , gooey desserts . Some of these family-oriented restaurants ( which seldom serve alcohol ) also specialize in all-you-can eat smorgasbords , although allowances are made for tiny appetites . One place , for example , prices meals for kids by their weight : five cents per pound . The annual Pennsylvania Dutch Food Festival , set to take place at many sites around the county June 13 to 18 , will provide a ready-made vacation focus . My first stop on my recent tour was the Pennsylvania Dutch Visitors Center , which offers a great map , piles of brochures and a 15-minute introductory film on the area . I learned that the Amish ( pronounced AH-mish , after founder Jakob Ammann ) are descendants of German-speaking Anabaptists , who believe the decision to be baptized should be made as an adult . The Amish broke off from the more liberal Mennonites three centuries ago , fled persecution in Europe and found peace in William Penn 's new colony and various other communities in North America . Both sects and a third Anabaptist group called the Brethren today live amicably in Lancaster County despite wide variations in customs . The dark clothing and simple lifestyle that distinguish the Old Order Amish symbolizes their commitment to their faith . They also take to heart the biblical edict against graven images , which tourists are asked to respect by not photographing them . Old Order Amish mingle with outsiders ( whom they generically refer to as `` English '' ) , and a few even invite visitors to join family dinners in their homes . They rarely cater to overnight guests . Tourists can , however , sample rural life firsthand on numerous Mennonite farms within a 10- or 15-mile radius of downtown Lancaster . Some of these bed and breakfast accommodations are rather spartan , but others , like Barbara and Harold Frey 's Morning Meadows Farm in Marietta , offer all the comforts of a country guest house along with a chance to experience the daily farm routine ( which , be warned , can start at dawn ) . My second-floor room at Morning Meadows Farm was prettily decorated in Victorian-country style and had a modern private bath and a small TV . Adjoining it was a cozy sitting room with magazines and another TV and outside was a wide porch offering panoramic views of fields and barns . I asked for a restaurant suggestion and Frey recommended the Country Table Restaurant in nearby Mount Joy . It was a family place , overlooking nothing but a packed parking lot , but it served one of the best restaurant meals I 've ever eaten : juicy pork chops , crisp salad , fresh vegetables , oven-baked potato and rolls , herb tea and a wedge of that molassesy Pennsylvania Dutch favorite , shoo-fly pie . Cost : $ 9.49 . This is an early-to-bed , early-to-rise culture and most restaurants close by 8 or 9 p.m. . Breakfast at Morning Meadows was at 8 a.m. , and consisted of an apple dumpling hot from the oven and French toast with bacon all delicious . While I lingered over my juice and coffee , the Freys chatted about the area and suggested sightseeing possibilities . Various auto-tape tours of the area are available at Lancaster 's Mennonite Information Center , but I preferred to take advantage of the center 's personal guide service ( $ 6 paid to the center , then a fee of $ 8.50 an hour to the guide who rides in your car ) . For the next two hours ( the minimum tour time ) , a Mennonite woman named Alverna Hess directed me along 20 or 30 miles of back roads , pointing out covered bridges , cemeteries and Amish traditions . Windmills whirred in many farmyards , and black dresses and shirts fluttered from clotheslines a sure sign , she said , of an Amish household , which has diesel-powered milking machines and propane-fired hot-water heaters to meet government health requirements but few other modern appliances . The occasional roadside phone booths we saw aren't public ones , Hess explained ; they belong to the nearest house another concession to the realities of doing business in the 20th century but kept at a discreet distance . After I dropped off my guide , I continued a few miles south of Lancaster to Strasburg , a pretty village with several attractions for train buffs including the nation 's oldest short-line railroad . Next I headed northwest to equally charming Lititz , which offers some of the best shopping in Lancaster County . The aromas alone led me to two must-stops : the Sturgis Pretzel Bakery and the Wilbur Chocolate Factory . At both you can watch the cooks in action and stock up on their products . ( Begin optional trim ) My second night was at one of the Inns at Doneckers , a collection of four restored houses , one the site of the first Donecker family business back in 1910 . I stayed in The Guesthouse , which has 20 distinctive rooms and suites . My room , one of the least expensive , was nevertheless the epitome of country style . Some walls were hand-stencilled , others exposed brick . Two handsome hooked rugs served as wall art . After breakfast , I strolled down the road to Doneckers Artworks , a four-story marketplace of artists ' studios and galleries with an adjoining farmers ' market . The market was stuffed with fresh produce and smelled of spring flowers , apple pie and Auntie Anne 's scrumptious , hand-rolled soft pretzels , so I was surprised at how few customers were there . The answer was clear as soon as I turned my car onto North State Street to head for the nearby competition . Traffic crawled most of the way to the Green Dragon market , one of the biggest in the county ( along with Lancaster 's Central Market and Root 's Market near Manheim ) . The Dragon was the quintessential country flea market an indoor/outdoor bazaar featuring everything from produce to clothing with , of course , the requisite supply of goodies down to homemade root beer . ( End optional trim ) Between markets , wineries , breweries , potteries , antiques markets and various fairs and festivals , there 's no end of country diversions around Lancaster ( note that some attractions are closed on Sundays ) . There 's also interesting walking in downtown Lancaster , which was Pennsylvania 's capital for 11 years and which served as the nation 's capital for one day Sept. 27 , 1777 when Congress stopped there after fleeing from Philadelphia . My most indelible memory of the area , however , remains the home-cooked meals turned out by seemingly every kitchen . I wonder if any of them delivers .
The word `` Caribbean '' may conjure up all kinds of vivid colors , but to V.S. Naipaul it suggests gray : a land and seascape bleached out by unmediated sun and a counterfeit history . It is the gray in the face of a professional entertainer the morning after a late night . The displacing and alienating effects of a colonial past on today 's post-colonial peoples has been Naipaul 's leading theme ever since , once past his early Trinidad novels , he broke through the colors to the gray underneath . He has pursued it in his fiction and non-fiction , set in Britain , Africa , South America and India , the home of his forebears . He is one of literature 's great travelers and also one of its oddest . He seeks not roots but rootlessness . He travels not for acquaintance but for alienation . Paul Theroux does that , to an extent , but the difference is very large . For one thing , Naipaul , who can be petty , vain and cruel , both uses and transcends his defects . His theme is the terrible inauthenticity that history has imposed on the heirs of colonialism 's subjects . But by refusing to conceal or temper his own crabby vision a walleyed sensibility that tends to swivel inward he achieves at his best moments a unique authenticity . His nightmare Argentina , for example , can be unrecognizable but there is no question about the nightmares that it produces in Naipaul . When he is not displaying a certain haste and roughness ( on purpose , perhaps , like a musician asserting his freedom to play sour ) , he is a great writer . In a magical and redeeming phrase he will suddenly link up the particular estrangements he acquires , wherever he goes , to the estranged wanderer in all of us . `` A Way in the World '' ( Alfred A . Knopf , $ 23 , 380 pp. ) is a series of partly autobiographical and partly fictional variations on his theme . Each centers on a different personage , and Naipaul himself appears in many of them . The principal characters differ widely . There is a Trinidadian who uses his color sense as both a funeral parlor cosmetician and a cake decorator ; and a conservative Port of Spain lawyer who unexpectedly reveals his flaming commitment to black power . There is a supercilious English writer who helps and patronizes the narrator ; an itinerant Caribbean radical `` an impresario of revolution '' who is lionized by the radically chic in London and New York , and an enterprising Venezuelan who has submerged his identity as a Trinidadian Hindu . Some of the figures are historical . Naipaul writes a vivid fictionalized account of Sir Walter Raleigh , aged and desperate , seeking to discover El Dorado as a way out of his political troubles at home . He paints a poignantly imagined portrait of the early Venezuelan revolutionary , Francisco de Miranda , lifted up and let down by his British patrons and finally , betrayed by the supporters of Bolivar , dying in a Spanish prison . At first glance there seems to be little connection among the real , part-real and fictional characters he writes of . The styles differ considerably too : from factual documentary to a first-person combination of memoir and commentary to poetic evocation . In fact all of the protagonists are linked by their passage through the world of the Caribbean . It is a world that , instead of evolving gradually through slow migrations and evolution , was created in a kind of cataclysm . In the space of a few years , the Spanish , the French and the British landed , fought each other , and shoved aside the Native Americans as unfit for their purpose . Their purpose was sugar plantations ; and to accomplish it they brought over slaves from Africa and indentured laborers from India . And then , after a couple of centuries , they were gone ; leaving behind a fragmented culture resting on a jumbled , conflicting , half-dreamed past . Naipaul doesn't draw the comparison , but one thinks of Prince Sigismund in Calderon 's `` Life Is a Dream . '' Arbitrarily immured in a tower from infancy , he suddenly finds himself arbitrarily released and royal once more in a wide and terrifying universe . Sigismund went temporarily mad . Naipaul 's characters are put together out of pieces that don't fit . Though not usually mad , they maneuver hybrid and uncertain identities through a world constructed of misapprehensions and are visited by undissolved bits of a heritage they are unconscious of . In his gentle corpse-and-cake decorator , Naipaul sees an ancestral ghost of `` the dancing groups of Lucknow , lewd men who painted their faces and tried to live like women . '' He adds : `` He frightened me because I felt his feeling for beauty was like an illness ; as though some unfamiliar deforming virus had passed through his simple mother to him and was even then .. . something neither of them had begun to understand . '' The lawyer , Evander , a properly British-mannered black professional in a still-colonial Trinidad , receives a courtesy visit from young Naipaul , about to depart for London on a prized scholarship . There is a starchy moment or two ; then , startlingly , Evander raises his fist , smiles , and says : `` The race ! The race , man ! '' It was meant as a secret , confraternal sign to a youth who was off to learn from the enemy and come back to fight . Except that Naipaul wasn't . He was off to gather the rewards that the British colonial authorities had implied would be his when he reached London with his prize . Instead there were years of misery , condescension and the grinding struggle to find himself as a writer . In his portrait of Foster Morris , an established author who helps him generously and then mortally offends him , Naipaul vents with gleeful malice his feelings toward the grip of British attitudes , not only on his country but also on his own divided nature . But Evander mistook young Naipaul in another respect , as well . As a member of Trinidad 's Indian minority , he felt no kinship with the black nationalist current that was to accompany independence in Trinidad and other parts of the Caribbean . On the contrary , he felt his own identity threatened ; as he would years later in Africa , where the Indian middle class was a particular target of black politics . Naipaul 's angers can be useful as well as shrill , and usually directed at those British and black who exercise power . The finest portraits are of figures torn and fluttering through their lives and identities . His Miranda is one of the best things he has done , and he writes of the deluded Raleigh with unusual compassion . And there is the Indian whom Raleigh , assuming he comes from El Dorado , takes back to London to make up for the gold he couldn't find . In fact , Don Jose comes from the well-settled province of Nueva Granada ( Colombia ) . His reflections on Raleigh and on European dreams have a haunting simplicity . Asked years later what difference he finds between the Europeans and the Indians , he answers with an irony that points up what Naipaul is after : `` I 've thought a lot about that . And I think , Father , that the difference between us , who are Indians , or half Indians , and people like the Spaniards and the English and the Dutch and the French , people who know how to go where they are going , I think that for them the world is a safer place . ''
ROOMMATES : Monday night on NBC . Eric Stoltz plays a Harvard-educated professional who is gay . Randy Quaid plays is a paroled bank robber who is not . They don't have much in common , except that they 're both suffering from AIDS and are sharing an apartment in a facility for AIDS patients . Quaid 's character 's view is that `` AIDS is God 's way of cleaning house . '' What begins as a rocky relationship grows into a supportive friendship at a time when the two men need it most . Elizabeth Pena plays the social worker who arranges for the men to share a room . Charles Durning plays the father of one of the men . BEFORE YOUR EYES : KRISTIN IS MISSING : Tuesday night on CBS . This is the story of 14-year-old Kristin Coalter of Kent City , Mich. , who ran away from home with truck driver Bill Neuville , 49 . Presented as the events unfolded , the movie begins soon after Kristin , a star athlete and straight-A student , disappeared on April 20 , 1993 , and follows her parents , Nancy and Larry Coalter , on an emotional ride for nearly seven months . CBS was alerted to this particular case by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children . About 450,000 children run away from home each year . One in seven teens runs away from home ; nearly a third become prostitutes within two days . Half of all runaways who return home run away again . 1994 WORLD MUSIC AWARDS : Tuesday night on ABC . Entertainers share the stage with members of the ruling family of Monaco for this seventh annual international special from Monte Carlo 's Sporting Club . The show , honoring the world 's best-selling recording artists for the year , was taped May 4 and will be seen in more than 80 countries . Among presenters : Prince Albert and Princess Caroline of Monaco , Fabio , Claudia Schiffer and David Copperfield . Host Patrick Swayze and his wife , Lisa Niemi , dance to an instrumental version of Whitney Houston 's `` All the Man That I Need . '' Their dance , choreographed by Lar Lubovitch , is the first time Swayze has danced on television and is a tribute to Houston , whose five awards make her the most lauded performer in the history of the event . Also honored : Placido Domingo , Ray Charles and the artist formerly known as Prince . JACQUI 'S DILEMMA : Thursday night on ABC . This dramatization of the decisions faced by a 16-year-old who becomes pregnant is interspersed with comments from parents , teens , educators , clergy , adoption-service counselors , social workers , teen-age parents and physicians ( including U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders ) , discussing the issues surrounding teen sexuality . Melissa Thompson portrays Jacqui . FALL FROM GRACE : Thursday and Friday nights on CBS . This four-hour mini-series , an international co-production filmed in Europe and based on Larry Collins 's novel , is set against the staging and landing of the Allied forces in Normandy in June 1944 . Michael York , Gary Cole , Patsy Kensit , Julian Curry and Richard Anconina head the large international cast . COMING & GOING : Friday night on PBS . Don't be put off : `` Coming & Going , '' a three-part PBS series on transportation , is not dull . It 's a series that really moves , so to speak , carried along by a fast-paced score . The series , beginning Friday night , is about the way transportation shapes our national character and our landscape . It mixes history , philosophy , facts and personal stories as it talks about railroads , container ships , airplanes , truckers hauling down the highways ; about building interstates and suburbs and light rail systems ; and about shipping to people in all areas what they want and need all year around . Filmed in two dozen states , the series is a project of producer Craig Perry . Perry hired National Public Radio 's Scott Simon to narrate and commissioned a lively and original score by David Hamilton . It was living in Los Angeles that caused Perry to realize that transportation `` becomes a dominant feature of your life . I was living the problem . I thought , ` As a television producer , there is something I can do about this . ' It 's been a six-year journey from the time the idea occurred until now , and I 've learned a lot . In the beginning , I went to find out who was doing this to us , and I realized that it wasn't anybody : We had met the enemy and he was us . ''
The little-noticed role of South African-made arms in the catastrophe of Rwanda presents Nelson Mandela with an early test of his ability to reconcile realism and idealism . At least 3,000 of Rwanda 's soldiers and militiamen carry South African-made R-4 automatic rifles . Rwanda bought them in 1992 from Armscor South Africa 's state-owned arms corporation along with 10,000 hand grenades , 20,000 rifle grenades , 10,000 launching grenades and more than 1 million rounds of ammunition . In Rwanda 's killing fields , such grenades and automatic rifles have been weapons of choice , after machetes . At the Christ Spirituality Center in Kigali , soldiers opened fire with automatic rifles , killing five diocesan priests , nine congregated women , three Jesuits and their cook . In Rukara , journalists came upon about 500 corpses inside a church . One survivor said the people had died when militiamen threw dozens of grenades inside the building . Will the new South Africa sell arms to countries like Rwanda ? Mandela , with his international reputation as a peace-aker , may not want to . But the United Nations trade embargo against South Africa is expected to be lifted soon , and new markets are already opening up for South Africa 's deadliest goods . Andre Buys , an executive for Armscor , told Defense News last month that `` we expect that by 1996 ( arms ) exports will at least double , and possibly quadruple . '' Like Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia before him , Mandela may find that his humanitarian impulses are not strong enough to resist the financial attractions of the arms trade . When Havel became president of Czechoslovakia in 1989 , he promised to end arms exports . But last year , after the country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia , both renewed sales . Before Mandela 's inauguration , ANC spokesman Madala Mthembu carefully suggested that the post-apartheid government would not abstain from the arms business . `` Once the new government is up and running , we will welcome a complete lifting of all remaining sanctions and embargoes against South Africa , '' Mthembu told Defense News . `` We also wish to state the new government will be in full compliance with international standards governing exports of technologies and materials that would threaten world security . '' Such standards would preclude arms sales to states like Libya , which is also currently subject to a U.N. embargo . But states like Rwanda before its present crisis would still be able to legally buy arms . Ethnic strife , which plagues much of the world , makes for a boom market in the weapons trade . And South African weapons are generally more reliable , accurate and durable than comparable arms made by Egypt , Russia , Romania and even Israel in some categories . While the world rejoices in witnessing apartheid 's downfall , it will have the unexpected effect of adding to the glut of arms already flooding the places that least need them , such as Rwanda , Sudan and Cambodia . No one expects Mandela to turn his back on what promises to become one of the new South Africa 's better earners of foreign exchange . But few would expect , either , a man who has devoted his life to his country 's struggle for justice , equality and human rights to turn his back on future victims of other abusive regimes . He doesn't necessarily have to . South Africa can afford to forgo sales of guns and grenades because it actually makes most of its profits from the sale of expensive , high-technology systems like laser-designated missiles , aircraft electronic warfare systems , tactical radios , anti-radiation bombs and battlefield mobility systems . This sort of weaponry , while potentially deadly , is much less likely to be used in human-rights abuses than small arms . In anticipation of an end to the U.N. embargo , South Africa created the Denel Corp. in 1992 . While Armscor has since served as the government 's defense-procurement organization , Denel has operated as a private manufacturing consortium , representing 60 percent of the arms industry . Denel expects to lead export sales ; such sales averaged $ 127.5 million in the early 1990s and increased to $ 222.2 million in 1993 . Rwanda 's purchase of $ 5.9 million of grenades , mortars and ammunition from Denel made only a tiny addition to South Africa 's balance sheet . South Africa also has a technological edge in land-mine-detection and -sweeping equipment especially needed by Cambodia and other countries . While South Africa has already begun to market this equipment , it announced in March that it would not sell land mines at the same time and stopped exports . Although it could be argued that this announcement was motivated more by appearance than principle , it was a welcome sign . But Mandela and the ANC 's stated policy isn't good enough . Exporting mine-sweeping equipment is a legitimate way to earn foreign exchange ; sales of any arms to human-rights violators are not . The new South Africa should re-examine its export policy on such items . International prohibitions against arms sales to abusive regimes are at present non-existent or weak . Rwanda , with its long-documented history of ethnic strife and its grisly record of human-rights abuses , is a case in point . Rather than sink to this standard , Mandela should lead the world in raising it up . Frank Smyth , a freelance journalist and investigative consultant , is the author of `` Arming Rwanda , '' published by the Human Rights Watch/Arms Project in New York .
A prep course for the month-long World Cup soccer tournament , a worldwide phenomenon to be played in the United States for the first time beginning June 17 , is available in a set of three home videos . Each of the three volumes by PolyGram Video lists for $ 14.95 and has a running time of about 60 minutes . The three volumes : `` World Cup USA '94 : The Official Preview , '' which includes a tournament history with footage all the way back to the first World Cup held in 1930 . There 's a look at the training of the 1994 U.S. team and a profile of Brazil 's Pele , just 17 when he took the 1958 event by storm , repeating in 1962 and 1970 . `` Top 50 Great World Cup Goals , '' highlighting exciting moments from competition beginning in 1966 with favorites such as Pele , Johan Cruyff , Diego Maradona , Roberto Baggio , Salvatore `` Toto '' Schillaci and Franz Beckenbauer . `` Great World Cup Superstars , '' focusing on the top names in the game , featured in the `` Goals '' cassette , and adding some interviews that offer an insight into what makes these stars shine . Three new basketball videos available : `` Sir Charles '' takes a look at the on-court intensity and dynamic skills of Charles Barkley of the Phoenix Suns as well as his entertaining off-court persona. $ 19.98 , 50 minutes , 1-800-999-VIDEO . `` NBA Superstars 3 '' follows up on two previous hit videos meshing the moves of the NBA 's elite with today 's hit music . This one includes Kenny Anderson , Steve Smith , Derrick Coleman , Larry Johnson , Dan Majerle , Alonzo Mourning , Hakeem Olajuwon , Mark Price , Shawn Kemp , Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars . Their play is matched with the music of Erick Sermon , M People , LL Cool J , Celine Dion , Domino , Soulhat , Soul Asylum , Buckshot LeFonque , Branford Marsalis , Pearl Jam and Rozella. $ 19.98 , 50 minutes , 1-800-999-VIDEO . `` Hog Wild : The Official 1994 NCAA Championship Video '' recaptures the excitement of the latest edition of March Madness and Arkansas 's march to the title with rousing victories over Michigan , Arizona and Duke in the three final games. $ 19.98 , 45 minutes , 1-800-747-7999 .
It is only natural that a writer make the literary most of whatever happens to him . In April 1984 the distinguished novelist Reynolds Price was asked by a friend with whom he was walking why he kept slapping his foot on the pavement . It was the first faint whisper of the monstrous illness that would roar across his body for the next four years . For unbeknown , an eel-shaped tubular cancer had taken root and was compressing his spinal cord . For the next four years the author would undergo radiation to his spinal cord , multiple surgical procedures diagnostic , palliative and the last , one hopes , curative . In addition to the paralysis of the lower half of the body , there was a slowly ascending numbness to just below the nipple line . And there was pain , real and phantom , the latter no less severe for all its suggestion of unreality . It was suffering worthy of Job . On page after page , we are confronted by the downright ugliness of suffering , its senselessness . Pain is not noble ; it is disgustingly ordinary . The reader tries to imagine the pain , but the language of pain is exclusive ; it is a tongue spoken by one person only . The rest of us are not conversant in it , nor can it be conveyed in words . Never mind , we shall know it in our turn . There is some danger in the reiteration of pain , that it will eventually have an anesthetic effect no matter how persuasive the writing . In this , it is not unlike pornography that within minutes becomes tedious . The rapture of others cannot be rendered in words either ; for that too we must wait our turn . `` A Whole New Life '' is Price 's candid account of his ordeal , written , he announces , to furnish others in similar trouble `` a companionable voice that 's lasted beyond all rational expectation . '' He has written it years after the white heat of the events and from the vantage of the crippled survivor . Like many such recountings , I suspect it was written also to exteriorize the horror , to put a barrier of printed pages between himself and what can best be described as a re-enactment of Dante 's `` Inferno . '' Eschewing the novelist 's proven gifts of style there is none of the elegance , nuance , ambiguity or wit of his powerful novel , `` Kate Vaiden '' he tells his story in a prose that is stripped down and pell-mell , utterly devoid of the pomp of language or the writer 's vanity . The sentences come spilling out much as the facts were remembered , but the meaning of the sometimes clotted paragraphs is never in doubt . Much of the book tells of the few ups and the many downs in his agonizing struggle to live the progressive loss of strength and sensation and function . With each diminution , along with the author , we contemplate sadly the little that remains from the much that was . A good deal of the account is moving : his brother 's preoperative kiss , and the fellowship of the `` gimps '' at the the rehabilitation center all striving to recover a modicum of independence . We cheer each brief respite from pain as we do his brave resumption of writing and teaching . What sustained him ? There was a seemingly endless line of kind friends and acquaintances who committed themselves over long periods of time to assist Price in recapturing the pace of his life . One 's inner strength is no match for suffering . It is not our own strength alone that will help us prevail , but the strength and commiseration of others . It takes courage to lean on others , but great suffering demands of us that humility . Too , there is Price 's lifelong belief in a God who is personally interested in him , if not always benevolent . This belief was made powerfully manifest just prior to the course of irradiation . The area on his back to be treated had already been marked out with purple dye . The radiation oncologist had informed the patient of all the possibilities . Shortly thereafter , Reynolds Price experienced an uncanny translocation in which he found himself lying on a slope by the Sea of Galilee in 1st-Century Palestine . Sleeping nearby were Christ and his 12 apostles all dressed in the tunics and cloaks of the time . In the distance he saw the town of Capernaum just as it was . Jesus looked much like the Flemish paintings of him , lean , `` tall with dark hair , unblemished skin and a self-possession both natural and imposing . '' He rose , directed Price to undress , then led the naked man into the waters of Galilee . Now , existing both with and outside of his body , the author could see the purple marks on his back . Again and again Jesus poured handfuls of water over him . There was dialogue : `` Your sins are forgiven . '' `` Am I also to be cured ? '' `` That too . '' From the moment Price 's mind returned to the here and now , he has believed this event to be neither dream nor vision but `` an external gift .. . of an alternate time and place in which to live through a crucial act . '' For Price , this experience had a tactile reality . It happened . Even the skeptical reader shivers in wild surmise . The man who emerges from these pages is feisty , gritty , angry , sometimes snobbish and , notwithstanding , most appealing . He makes no effort to portray himself as a saint or a martyr . The clerk at the hospital is `` sullen . '' The cardiac fitness participants are imagined as `` a squad of garrulous heart-attack survivors in designer sweat suits . '' Many of the `` true practical saints '' who offer to help him are `` boring as root canals . '' It is the radiation oncologist , cast as the villain , who bears the brunt of Price 's anger and resentment . He has `` all the visible concern of a steel cheese-grater '' ; he `` never offered to tell me ... '' ; he is `` the frozen oncologist . '' And here another physician must demur . Was it not this very doctor , among others , whose judgment and therapy brought about the cure of his patient ? Surely , that he is not also gifted with charm or bedside manner might be forgiven ? Some doctors , particularly those whose work brings them daily into contact with the gravely ill and whose treatments themselves augment the suffering , may function better when they withhold or even stifle pity , compassion , aesthetic response than when they allow these feelings full sway . Certainly there are great doctors who are also haughty , cold , materialistic and insensitive ; just as there are great artists who fall short of expectations . Beethoven , Wagner and Richard Strauss were bigoted , angry , domineering . Schopenhauer and Rossini were scornful and misanthropic . Da Vinci and Goethe were detached , aloof and condescending . And then there was Robert Frost . It is in the final section of the book that Price rises above the dreadful years and reaches out to his new life . It is a life full of satisfactions , work , friends and even erotic love . `` Reynolds Price , '' he told himself , `` is dead . '' And asked himself : `` Who can you be ? '' The answer is : a writer and a teacher as before , only now with the patience and watchfulness born of suffering , and the blessing of whole days of focused energy undiluted by the distractions of the able-bodied . In the years since his illness , Reynolds Price has written 14 books . His last advice to the afflicted is to finish grieving for the former self , to reach out hungrily to the new and to find work that sustains the spirit . In writing `` A Whole New Life '' Reynolds Price has come , in the words of Adrienne Rich , `` to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail . '' There can be no sweeter use made of adversity than this act of generosity that comes in the form of a book .
The crisis that has been rapidly building over North Korea 's suspected nuclear weapons program seems for now to have abated . Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency have been sent to Pyongyang to see what they can learn about the refueling of a key reactor that is now under way . Washington , welcoming this and other recent signs hinting at a more cooperative attitude by the North , says that it 's ready to reopen high-level contacts with Kim Il Sung 's regime . So for the moment at least the United States doesn't have to worry about trying to muster international support for economic sanctions against a country that , at a minimum , seems to have done all it can to encourage the belief that it has been violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty . How long that moment will last is up to Pyongyang . The key question is whether North Korea will let IAEA inspectors examine several hundred specifically chosen fuel rods from its five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon , north of Pyongyang . By analyzing certain rods the IAEA could tell how long they had been in the reactor , and that in turn would indicate whether other fuel rods had earlier been secretly removed . There 's a suspicion , heightened in the last few days by the claims in Tokyo of a North Korean defector who once worked at the Yongbyon reprocessing plant , that 26 pounds of plutonium were secretly extracted from spent fuel rods in 1988 . That supports the CIA 's suspicion that the North has produced enough plutonium for a couple of nuclear devices . The United States is ready it wouldn't be too much to say eager to move toward normal relations with North Korea and so help stabilize Northeast Asia . Rightly , though , it conditions such a move on Pyongyang 's readiness to meet its responsibilities under the Non-Proliferation Treaty . South Korea supports the American effort . If North Korea goes along , it could see its diplomatic and economic isolation end . If it balks , new pressures would fall on its weak economy . Enlightened self-interest makes the choice clear . The question is whether a regime that has for decades zealously preached the virtues of inward-looking self-reliance is able finally to recognize where its true long-term interests lie .
Step by step , President Clinton seems to be maneuvering himself into a position on Haiti where his only option may be military intervention . If that is the president 's intention , it should be reversed forthwith . He must know that two-thirds of the American people oppose such a step ; that with the first American casualties there will be a clamor for withdrawal of U.S. forces ; that the last time Marines marched ashore in Haiti , in 1915 , they were there 19 years , and after taking 126 combat and non-combat casualties left behind a trained and oppressive military . The ideal solution evidently sought by Clinton is sufficient international pressure to force the Haitian generals now in control into exile . There is a precedent : In 1986 , the United States was able to send dictator Jean Claude `` Baby Doc '' Duvalier packing . But there is another precedent : his father , Francois `` Papa Doc '' Duvalier , successfully defied a U.S. show of force in 1963 . By tightening the embargo on Haiti over last weekend , the world community decided in effect to increase the suffering of the Haitian people in order to liberate them . Food and medicine are the exception . But as jobs and private-sector imports of vital commodities disappear , aid organizations warn that hunger and death will increase . Some of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide 's more fervent supporters , both foreign and domestic , are willing to have the poorest people in the hemisphere 's poorest country pay this price . The situation could force President Clinton 's hand . Having taken on a certain responsibility for worsening the plight of the Haitian people and having drawn only defiance from Haiti 's military government , he may find himself with little choice other than to order the Marines ashore . Some 650 aboard the USS Wasp are moving into position . What then ? Will U.S. citizens be taken hostage in a desperate counter-move by the present government ? Will Haitian forces crumble at the first sight of the Marines , as their leaders flee to luxurious exile ? Will Father Aristide 's revenge-minded followers then turn on the soldiers that remain ? Or will a form of civil war break out , part ethnic and part class-based , that will make a mockery of quick-solution scenarios ? And even if U.S. forces stay the course , under the facade of a multinational intervention , just what will their mission be ? To feed the masses ? That 's the easy part , as humanitarian successes in Somalia illustrate . To crack down on violence-minded factions ? That 's a much tougher role , one the U.S. could not sustain in Somalia . To rebuild the Haitian government and and economy ? That 's a task the U.S. never really attempted in Somalia , that it flunked the last time out in Haiti and that it is unlikely to assume again , given the budget squeeze and public opinion . So Clinton is boxed in by the Haiti crisis , and so is our country . Any solution other than the quick capitulation of the present military government offers little but pain and foreboding .
It isn't easy for athletes to be legends anymore . Over-analyzed by cranky sportswriters , noisily critiqued by moronic sports talk-radio callers , their gravity-defying feats have been reduced to ESPN highlight-reel fodder . Just ask Barry Bonds , whose most enduring media moment remains his nasty on-the-field shouting match with then-manager Jim Leyland . Sports legend derives from larger-than-life feats , created away from the glare of the spotlight . It belongs to the oral tradition , tales told and retold , till they take on an appropriately mythic stature . Who knows if Babe Ruth really pointed to the right-field bleachers and called his shot in the 1932 World Series ? Who actually saw Pete Gray , the St. Louis Browns ' one-armed outfielder , in action , throwing a runner out at home plate ? How many people got to watch Johnny Vander Meer pitch a no-hitter in two consecutive games ? In baseball , the murkiest of all legends have sprung from the mythic twilight of the Negro Leagues . Thrown together during the sorry days of segregated sport , they showcased the young black gods of baseball , performing in the same cities often in the same ballparks as major-league players , sometimes even wearing the big-leaguers ' discarded uniforms . That 's where you 'd find Leroy `` Satchel '' Paige , barnstorming across the country in wheezing buses , sleeping in fleabag hotels , playing in ramshackle bandboxes across town from the storied major-league ballparks . Of all the mythic stars of Negro baseball , Satchel was mythic-squared . Unhittable in his prime , he once struck out 22 men in a game , beat Bob Feller 1-0 in a 13-inning exhibition game and was so indomitable he threw a no-hitter in the first game of a double-header and then pitched relief in the nightcap . After hitting .398 in the Pacific Coast League in 1935 , Joe DiMaggio prepared for his rookie season with the New York Yankees by facing Paige in a much-ballyhooed exhibition game . The future Hall of Famer managed a measly infield hit in four trips to the plate , moving a Yankee scout to wire home : `` DiMaggio all we hoped he 'd be : hit Satch one for four . '' The legend simmered , soaking up its rich flavor in obscurity . As far as the white press was concerned , Paige ( who was as celebrated in '30s-era black circles as Cab Calloway or Louis Armstrong ) might as well have been pitching in Outer Mongolia . When Time magazine finally discovered Paige in 1940 15 years into his career it offered some legendry of its own . Attributing Satchel 's arm strength to his boyhood shouldering of 200-pound blocks of ice , the news magazine quoted Paige 's old ice-wagon employer as saying : `` That boy et mo ' than the hosses . '' Until now , that 's been the Satch story : Print the caricature . But judging from `` Don't Look Back , '' Mark Ribowsky 's meticulously researched biography , there is another , considerably starker and less sentimental side to Paige . Raised in the rough-and-tumble ghetto area of Mobile , Ala. , Paige was a restless , lonely man , a black shadow in a white-only world , his soul shriveled by a lack of acceptance , both from his family and the realm of big-time sport . Before he was 20 , Paige had hit the road , learning his pitching craft on baseball 's chitlins circuit . Though Ribowsky is more successful at sketching the Negro League milieu than fleshing out Paige 's character , the scrawny , rawboned pitcher emerges as a man of few loyalties , either to friend or team , indifferent to family ties , easily seduced by a pretty woman or a fat paycheck . Take away his wonderful wit and legendary showmanship and dare we say it Satchel might be almost as hard to love as Barry Bonds . Resolutely unfaithful to every woman in his life , Paige was jealous of teammates ' success , a hard-drinking carouser , habitually late to even the most important games and disdainful of anything resembling a training regime . Paige was at least 42 ( some say 44 or even 48 ) when Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck finally brought him to the big leagues in 1948 , a year after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier . Making his first appearance in relief on July 9 , he was the man who brought black vaudeville style to white sport , decades before the high five , the monster jam and the end-zone dance . Paige mystified batters with a carnival assortment of trick pitches . Using a double or even triple windup with a huge leg kick , he 'd throw what he called a Step ' n Pitch-it , a Bat Dodger and finally , his mind-boggling Hesitation Pitch , where he held back his right arm even as his front leg swept his body forward , releasing the ball almost as an afterthought . The first major-leaguer who tried to hit the Hesitation Pitch lunged and swung before the pitch was half-way to the plate , his bat flying 40 feet up the third-base line . Satch was a sensation . By the time he started his first major-league game on Aug. 3 , 72,562 fans were at Cleveland 's Municipal Stadium , a new attendance record for a major-league night game . Though well past his prime , Paige played parts of six seasons in the majors and was good enough to be named to the 1952 All-Star team . Never a friend to Robinson he had given him the cold shoulder in the Negro Leagues he displayed little of Robinson 's credit-to-his-race good citizenry . Paige missed trains , broke curfew and carried around a gun a foot and a half long . His eccentricities won him huge play in the white press , which viewed him as post-integration baseball 's answer to Louie Armstrong Satchmo meet Satch a happy-go-lucky old coot who rubbed mystery potions on his pitching arm , dozed in the bullpen grass and issued such maxims as , `` If your stomach disputes you , lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts '' and the immortal phrase ( which Ribowsky borrows for his book title ) , `` Don't look back . Something might be gaining on you . '' These nostrums were strictly for media consumption . In real life , the string-bean pitcher burned the candle at every end . As Ribowsky recounts in vivid detail , Paige was far from the only model of impropriety in the 1930s-era Negro Leagues . Many of the most prominent teams were owned by gangsters such as Gasoline Gus Greenlee , who ran the Pittsburgh Crawfords , using the team as a legit cover for his numbers racket . Paige was hardly intimidated by Greenlee 's mob ties . When a promoter offered him more money to barnstorm through the Dakotas , Paige abruptly walked out on his new contract with the Crawfords . Aloof and enigmatic all the way to his grave , Paige seems to have defeated his biographer 's best efforts to penetrate his inscrutable mask . None of Paige 's offspring would talk to Ribowsky , while the dim memories of his ball-playing peers offer little in the way of insight . Eager to provide Paige 's exploits with some heft , Ribowsky sometimes aims too high , using quotes from Henry Miller , William Faulkner and ( ! ) Daniel Defoe to open various chapters . Satchel surely would have loved rubbing elbows with such glittering literati . But the lofty sentiments don't get Ribowsky any closer to this flesh-and-blood folk character . Describing his long and lean physique , Satch once said : `` There was a lot to me , but it was all up and down . '' Whatever was inside seems to have wafted away , like an unhittable Paige curveball , rising and swooping in the dim light of an extra-inning game . The book 's evocative subtitle , `` Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball , '' is all too apt . For all Ribowsky 's good efforts , the real shadow here is Satchel himself .
CyberSurfing : Potholes , perturbations and predicaments observed on the information superhighway : A Playboy story titled `` Orgasms Online '' left one virtual community more steamed than steamy this spring . The story prominently featured the Sausalito , Calif.-based WELL ( for Whole Earth ' Lectronic Link ) among other services . With perhaps 10,000 members , the WELL is minuscule by the standards of commercial on-line services like Prodigy and CompuServe that boast more than a million users . But it has influence beyond its size because its hundreds of on-line conferences attract an articulate crowd that includes writers , artists and high-tech cognoscenti . For the WELLbeings , as many call themselves , Playboy perpetrated an awful mischaracterization of their electronic hangout . Although there are areas in which sexuality is discussed , the tone tends toward the playful . It is also a decidedly more thoughtful place than , say , America Online , the randier areas of which resemble nothing so much as a cheap-beer singles bar . Along with making angry accusations that author Matthew Childs got the story wrong , WELL users said Childs quoted their on-line postings without permission a violation of the etiquette of the WELL , where the phrase `` You Own Your Own Words '' has an almost mantra-like quality . One user found that her discussion of an on-line love affair gone bad had been transmuted by Playboy into an offer to share transcripts of hot modem sessions with an ex-beau an offer she had never made : `` .. . ( Y ) ou are a liar . I never , ever promised anyone , anywhere , that I would share ` hot chat ' transcripts or log with them . I don't even keep such logs ! What I said , Mr. I 'm A Journalist And Get My Facts Straight Bigshot , is that I would share the name of the cybercad .. . with people who asked in e-mail . `` .. . ( Y ) ou can blow it all out your i/o port , bunky . '' Worst of all , they said , the publicity is likely to attract the wrong crowd to the WELL namely , horny guys who think that Sausalito is where the action is . That 's exactly what happened . One user , Linda Castellani , said in a recent on-line interview that `` there has been an increase in those who were clearly brought here by the article with an expectation of meeting women and having hot sex . '' Most of the newcomers , however , don't stick around for long . The WELL is clubby to many visitors , suffocatingly so . That 's what the buzz-phrase `` virtual community '' might ultimately come down to : not just who belongs , but who doesn't . It could have been worse . I recall in college an editor at Hef 's mag asked me to hand out questionnaires for the magazine 's `` Sexiest Colleges '' survey , a highly scientific endeavor . I declined , but one of my roommates was willing . He handed it out at a massive bash ; the questionnaires became the party game ; `` can you top this '' fever swept the assembled multitude . After the party , another roommate took the remaining questionnaires to a local gay bar . Do you even need to ask ? The University of Texas was deemed the sexiest school in the nation by Playboy . John Schwartz jswatz ( at ) well.sf.ca.us GETTING THERE : To visit the WELL , call ( 415 ) 332-4335 ( by low-tech voice ) and ask for guidance . If you are already a WELL member : The flame war erupted on the Sex Conference , Topic 414 , and spread to other WELL forums from there . To find the Sex Conference type : g sex at any OK prompt . To find the topic , type r 414 at the next OK prompt . To get an OK prompt from a respond/pass prompt , type q . -0- Early news of Kurt Cobain 's death began an explosion of commentary in the Alternative Rock Forum on America Online . Grieving cries of shock and anguish meshed with poems and messages to Cobain 's wife , Courtney Love , and their daughter , Frances . But there were also smatterings of mean-spirited assaults on Cobain , his wife , his music and lifestyle ; one was a drawing done with keyboard characters that depicted a man with a shotgun in his mouth . Weirdly enough , Courtney Love 's estranged father , Hank Harrison , joined in the postings . Using the log-on `` BioDad , '' he described himself in one message as being a `` rich , '' 280-pound man who raises pit bulls , rides motorcycles and gardens . ( A spokesman for Love 's record label confirmed that `` BioDad '' is who he says he is . ) In his postings , Harrison said he has been working on a book about Cobain and Nirvana for two years now , and `` I know things that are so unbelievable , I couldn't believe them . '' He fears that his daughter is in danger of `` going with Kurt , '' especially if the child , Frances , is taken away again . ( Child protection authorities did this once after Vanity Fair reported she had used heroin while pregnant . ) Harrison posted a copy of the letter he sent the White House describing his proposal for a `` Kurt Cobain Foundation for Suicide Prevention '' and asked that he be invited to meet with the president and Chelsea to discuss the details . Harrison continues to participate in the forum despite harsh words from a friend of Love 's calling him a liar and a parasite . Karen Mason Marrero kmarrero ( at ) aol.com GETTING THERE : Sign onto American Online . ( To subscribe to America Online , call this voice line : 800-827-6364 . ) Hit the Lifestyles and Interests conference icon ; go to the Rocklink folder ; then the Rocklink forum ; then click onto the Alternative Rock Message Board , then browse the folders for Hole ( the name of Courtney Love 's band ) , and Remembering Cobain .
Found something intriguing , improbable , insane or especially useful on the Internet ? Tip The Washington Post 's Karen Mason Marrrero kmarrero ( at ) aol.com or Joel Garreau garreau ( at ) well.sf.ca.us .
CyberSurfing : Potholes , perturbations and predicaments on the Information Superhighway : Blowing in the Wind There 's been a song going through my head for some time now , only I don't know the words . Actually , I don't know the tune either , but I hope to soon because of e-mail . The song is `` Hurricane Janet , '' about the storm that hit the Caribbean in mid-September 1955 . It wasn't the worst hurricane of the century , but because it occurred the week I was born and we had the same name , I was never allowed to forget it . Growing up in Wisconsin , I was teased about my eponymous meteorological event , though in fact my parents had already settled on my name before the hurricane was a cloud in the sky . Later , when I began to spend time in the Caribbean , gentlemen of a certain age would start humming the calypso song when they heard my name . They said the song was by the Mighty Sparrow , the greatest calypsonian of all time , though it seemed nobody could remember all the lyrics . I tried to find a recording in the Caribbean , but it was out of print . After I subscribed to America Online this year , I decided to give it another try . Searching the service 's membership profiles brief resumes in which subscribers can indicate their address , age , hobbies and any other information they wish to share with other members I located Kevin Burke , a freelance writer , photographer and calypso fan in Cambridge , Mass. . I messaged him about `` Hurricane Janet . '' I hit pay dirt . Kevin answered , saying he didn't know the song but was working on it . First , he had left a telephone message for Sparrow himself in Trinidad . ( For readers unfamiliar with calypso , this is roughly equivalent to buzzing Frank Sinatra about a '40s pop number . ) Kevin also gave me a list of calypso experts in this country to consult , including Steve Shapiro , who , he pointed out , lives in Takoma Park , as my profile showed I do . I recognized the name but I wasn't sure why . Then I realized the answer was literally in front of my nose , on a list of neighborhood telephone numbers taped on the wall over my desk : Steve Shapiro , federal worker and calypso expert , lives across the street , though we 'd never met . I introduced myself and over the next few weeks , we had several conversations , but while Shapiro 's music knowledge and record collection are both legendary , he didn't have `` Hurricane Janet . '' In mid-March , Burke messaged again . `` I talked to the Mighty Sparrow today , '' he wrote , `` and he told me that the song about Hurricane Janet was sung by Lord Melody . '' Melody , a calypso elder statesman best known for his 1956 classic `` Mama , Look a ' Boo-Boo Dey , '' had died in the 1980s , Burke said . Sparrow had sung a few of the lyrics to Burke on the telephone : `` Janet , stay in the mountains ! `` Janet , you go blow down plenty buildings ! `` Janet , your sister is Katie ! `` Janet , go straight to Miami ! '' I ran across the street to tell Steve , who said he had some Melody recordings and would look into the matter . The next day , I walked out my door to find Steve in his front yard , waving his arms and shouting something . I finally made out the words : `` Janet ! It is by Sparrow !! '' Steve had located a fellow calypso maven in Oneonta , N.Y. , who had a recording of my song . Apparently , Sparrow either meant that he had sung the song but didn't write it , or had recorded so many songs over the years that he had simply forgotten . Now , I 'm waiting for the tape of my song to arrive by `` snail-mail '' the U.S. Postal Service . Until then , I have another project : How about this Hurricane Katie ? Janet Higbie higbiej ( at ) twp.com GETTING THERE : Sign on to America Online . To locate other subscribers interested in the Caribbean or other topics , select Search Member Directory from Members menu . Type in topic for list of members who have indicated similar interest . -0- Old Scams in New Electrons `` MAKE.MONEY.FAST '' read the message sent recently to hundreds of subscribers to `` DEAF-L , '' a computer discussion list for people interested in deafness-related issues . The note was filled with heartrending tales of people who had been down to their last few dollars when a miraculous solution appeared in the form of an e-mail letter . Suddenly their bank accounts were full , their spirits were lifted , and they were overcome with the desire to share the secret of their wealth with their fellow Internet travelers . In summary , the note 's words of wisdom were this : Send $ 10 to the person at the top of this mailing list , add your name to the bottom and send it to 100 friends . That 's right , it was one of those chain letters that kids and gullible adults copy and mail out to their friends . Now they 've hit cyberspace and the possibilities are endless . With one message , one can , as the DEAF-L subscriber did , send the chain to hundreds , even thousands of people . Cyberspace legal experts who were consulted through a posting on their discussion group CYBERIA-L said such a chain may constitute a pyramid scheme and posting it on the Internet might be illegal under the statutes prohibiting wire fraud . The `` send money now '' chain isn't the only old chestnut floating around cyberspace . Remember Craig Shergold , the ailing kid who was once trying to collect a record number of business cards ? That effort stopped years ago , but just last week an e-mail asking for business cards appeared on several discussion lists . The infamous cookie recipe that Neiman Marcus allegedly sold for $ 250 a story the store adamantly denies showed up not once but twice recently on a discussion list for fans of the `` Highlander '' movies and television show . `` This is a perfect example of how Internet perpetuates Urban Legends and is a perfect example of how things should not be reposted everywhere , '' wrote DEAF-L subscriber Claire Maier in an effort to forestall further chain postings . `` The only explanation I have is that people are sheep , '' wrote Maier , a PhD candidate in neuroscience at Emory University . `` Someone says , ` Post this to a zillion newsgroups ... ' and people do it . '' Brooke A . Masters mastersb ( at ) twp.com GETTING THERE : To subscribe to DEAF-L , sign on to any commercial ( America Online etc. ) or private network capable of sending messages on the Internet . Follow the `` mail '' prompts that set you up to send an e-mail message . Send a message to LISTSERV SIUCVMB.BITNET and leave the subject line blank ( AOL users do specify subject ) . In the body of the message , write SUBSCRIBE DEAF-L and your name .
After any disaster , the question always arises as to when a destination that has been hard hit whether by hurricane , earthquake , fire , flood or war is ready to give visitors their money 's worth . Often these places , although not yet in the best shape , will offer an incentive to tempt more adventurous travelers to be the first to return . Such is the case of war-torn Croatia , which is desperately in need of the potentially lucrative tourist income . This summer , and perhaps for another year , it is promising low prices-particularly for lodging . In the beautiful old resort city of Dubrovnik , I stayed last month for about $ 70 a night less than half the price I had paid for not nearly as nice a hotel room a few days earlier in Milan , Italy . Right now , rooms in private homes in Dubrovnik are going for as little as $ 10 a night . `` The prices are very low , '' says Pave Zupan Ruskovic , president of Atlas , one of Croatia 's biggest travel agencies . `` It 's one way to bring tourism back . '' This is , I think , a fair exchange . With a civil war still rumbling in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina , Croatia is a problematic destination and personal safety is a matter of at least some concern . But at bargain prices , the new country is also an inviting place at least for those who are aware of the drawbacks of a visit . Before its breakup , Yugoslavia was a popular vacation spot for other Europeans and for Americans . As it happens , the new Croatia now possesses old Yugoslavia 's primary tourist asset , the long , still mostly pristine Adriatic Coast stretching south from the Istrian Peninsula to Dubrovnik . Among the nations formed from Yugoslavia , its tourism prospects are brightest . Currently , the U.S. . State Department is warning Americans to stay away from Serbia , Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina because of continuing strife or safety problems . No such warning has been issued for Croatia , neighboring Slovenia and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia . Slovenia is probably least affected by the ongoing Bosnian crisis , and it offers plenty of scenic and cultural attractions and good dining and lodging . Macedonia is a developing nation with limited tourist facilities . The severe impact of the war on Croatia 's tourist income is evident in statistics quoted by national tourism officials . Before 1990 , Croatia reported 60 million overnight stays annually , says Velimir Simicic , Croatia 's deputy minister of tourism . In 1993 , the figure was only 13 million most of them Germans and Eastern Europeans vacationing on the Istrian Peninsula . This summer , the country hopes to double last year 's number . Before the war , the city of Dubrovnik counted on tourism for about 90 percent of its income . Should you go to Croatia now to take advantage of the bargains or wait until peace is assured ? It is a question individuals must answer for themselves . Some factors to consider : Safety The situation in Zagreb , the capital ; on the Istrian Peninsula ; and in most areas of Croatia is calm , says the State Department . But it warns against travel to four United Nations Protected Areas that border Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia . Localized shelling has occurred adjacent to these areas . With one important exception , the Adriatic Coast the principal destination that Croatia currently is promoting is not affected . The exception is the coastal road just north of Zadar , where a pontoon bridge replaces the former bridge that was destroyed in Croatia 's war to defend its independence . The bridge , which crosses an inlet , is within potential enemy shellfire , according to a public affairs officer in the U.S. . Embassy in Zagreb , who asked not to be identified . However , the bridge is open , and motorists including tourists are using it regularly without harm , says Karen Suric in Atlas 's New York office . According to her , travelers who want to drive the length of the Adriatic Coast to Dubrovnik but avoid the bridge can take an auto ferry that operates far outside the shelling range . As for street crime directed at tourists , incidents are low . But as in any country , you should beware of pickpockets and muggers in tourist sites such as bus and railway stations . For a current safety report , contact the State Department 's Citizens Emergency Center , ( 202 ) 647-5225 , or the U.S. . Embassy in Zagreb , 011-385-41-444-800 . Visas Americans must have a visa to travel in Croatia , but a tourist visa valid for three months can be obtained at no cost on arrival either at border crossings or the airport . There is a drawback to this process , however . When I arrived by plane in Zagreb , about 25 passengers werelined up at the visa window , and only one immigration officer was on duty . Each visa took him two or three minutes to fill out . I was near the end of the line and waited for more than a half hour . Only after I had my visa could I proceed through immigration to baggage claim and customs . Also , the Croatian Embassy in Washington warns that some airlines deny boarding for flights to Croatia if you don't have a visa . To avoid a delay , you can apply for a visa in person or by mail from the Croatian Embassy , 2343 Massachusetts Ave. NW , Washington , D.C. 20008 , ( 202 ) 588-5899 . Embassy-issued visas are valid for 12 months . By mail , there is a $ 9 return postage fee . Where to Go & Stay As in the past , most visitors probably will stick close to the lovely turquoise waters of the Adriatic . Although lodgings from modest to luxurious dot the long coast and the many offshore islands , the area is relatively undeveloped in contrast to the French or Italian rivieras . In the north , the Istrian Peninsula and the offshore islands of Krk , Cres , Rab and Pag offer excellent beach vacation possibilities in an area untouched by the war . It is easily reached by car from northern Italy and elsewhere in Europe . The area around Dubrovnik experienced heavy damage . Beach pleasures are possible , but the ancient city should appeal more to travelers interested in seeing the impact of the war for themselves and the recovery that is being made . Among the top hotels now open are the Hotel Argentina ; its neighboring affiliate , the beautiful Villa Orsula ( where I stayed ) ; and the charming Hotel Villa Dubrovnik . All are within a 10-minute walk of the old city . A 10-minute drive away is the large and modern Hotel Dubrovnik President . All feature either sand or rocky beaches and good sea views . At the Hotel Argentina , a room for one is about $ 58 ; for two , about $ 90 . At the Villa Orsula , a single is $ 68 and a double is $ 116 . Breakfast is included . Other top hotels are in the same price range . But budget travelers can stay in a room in a private home for about $ 10 for one or two people . Zagreb is pretty and culturally interesting , and there are scenic drives north of the city into countryside that still retains the look of old Europe . Because Zagreb gets a lot of business travelers , its hotel rates are higher . Rates in the best hotels-which include the Palace , Dubrovnik , Inter-continental and Esplanade-range from about $ 95 to $ 150 a night for a room . Some tours have resumed out of Split to the Catholic shrine of Medugorje , which is located across the border in Bosnia . Aboard my plane from Zurich , a group of 16 New Englanders planned a week 's pilgrimage . However , the U.S. . Embassy in Croatia discourages such trips , says a spokeswoman . Escorted sightseeing and outdoor adventure tours and air/hotel/rental car packages are available throughout most U.S. or Croatian travel agencies . I paid Atlas $ 879 for a package that included two nights lodging in Zagreb , three nights in Dubrovnik , five full breakfasts , flights between Zagreb and Dubrovnik and Split and Zagreb , a car and driver between Dubrovnik and Split , and all airport transfers . For Information : Croatia does not maintain a tourism information office in the United States . However , information including lodging choices and island ferry schedules is available from Atlas Ambassador of Dubrovnik , the New York office of the Atlas travel agency ( Lincoln Building , 60 E. 42nd St. , New York , N.Y. 10165 , 212-697-6767 ) .
No mere day at the beach , that 's the D-Day Normandy Commemorative Celebration Weekend in Virginia Beach , Va. , June 3-5 . The battle plan for the 50th anniversary weekend includes a Fort Story commemorative ceremony and re-enactment of the invasion at the fort 's Omaha Beach , June 4 ; a parade and Stage Door canteen show ; historical displays ; and a wreath-laying . The 29th Infantry ( Maryland , Virginia , West Virginia and District of Columbia ) was the first unit to land its troops on Normandy 's Omaha Beach . Visitors are advised to arrive early for the re-enactment . Above events are free . Information : ( 800 ) 822-3224 . -0- Calling the World The world 's calling get the message ? AT&T 's new WorldPlus Communication Service offers travelers a range of calling and messaging features-from more than 40 countries . By dialing a toll-free access number and entering account and identification numbers , subscribers make calls from abroad , back home or elsewhere ; set up conference calls ; use a personal mailbox to send and receive voice and fax messages worldwide ; and tap into information services ( interpreters ) , travel services and more . Cost is $ 70 annually , plus additional charges for calls-for example , $ 1.99 per minute for any call within Europe . Information : ( 800 ) 382-5612 . -0- TRAVEL TRIVIA WHAT CARIBBEAN CITY HAS THE LARGEST POPULATION ? TRIVIA ANSWER : HAVANA . -0- Soaping Up A little fanfare , please , for the stars of daytime TV and the Soap Opera Fan Fair , in Mackinaw City , Mich. , June 1-5 . Ogle more than 50 soap producers , writers and stars including Linda Dano ( Felicia Gallant on `` Another World '' ) and Eric Braeden ( Victor Newman on the `` The Young and the Restless '' ) ; get autographs , plus the inside scoop from soap editors ; or do moonlight cruises . Tickets for the fair , on the Mackinac Straits ' State Ferry Dock , are $ 25 per day or $ 75 for five-day passes ( cruises extra ) . For tickets and help with accommodations , call ( 800 ) 817-SOAP ( 800-817-7627 ) . -0- ON TOURS New tours of Oskar Schindler 's Poland , of movie and book fame , start June 15 . Travel writer and historian Stu Feiler has organized 11-day tours around the movie version of `` Schindler 's List . '' The tour includes Jewish historic d istricts , synagogues and Holocaust memorials , including old and new Krakow and Plaszow and southeast Poland , to see the camp that held Schindler 's Jews , his factory , home and more . Cost is $ 1,800 per person , double occupancy , including air fare from Washington , accommodations and most meals . Information : ( 312 ) 587-1950 . -0- Ruff Stuff Dog tired of vacationing without Fido ? It 's board and bored no more , for your pooch , with Doggone , the bimonthly newsletter of `` fun places to go and cool stuff to do with your dog . '' Doggedly reported are pet-friendly lodgings-hotels , resorts , country inns , even five-star hotels that cater to Phydeaux . The newsletter also walks you through pet-friendly attractions parks , beaches , even theme parks that allow dogs plus tips on health care , plane and car travel , events and more . Subscriptions are $ 24 for one year . Information : ( 407 ) 569-8434 .
Forget the Freedom Trail get on the JFK trail , with new tours of JFK 's Boston , starting Friday . Through Oct. 23 , the three-hour trolley expeditions ( designed in conjunction with the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum ) visit famous Kennedy landmarks from his birthplace in Brookline and the Harvard campus , to his favorite restaurant ( the Union Oyster House , where he chowdered down ) and the Omni Parker House Hotel , where he announced for the presidency . Tours wind up at the Kennedy Library . Reservations are suggested but not required . Tickets for the Old Town Trolley tour which leaves from the Park Plaza Welcome Center , 52 Eliot St. are $ 20 for adults , $ 15 for students and those age 65 and up , and $ 10 for ages 5 to 14 . Information : ( 617 ) 269-7150 .
Wonk Inflation : When the political debate over health-care reform heated up a few years ago , New York publisher Faulkner & Gray compiled an annual directory with names , numbers , photos and profiles of `` the most influential health policy-makers and organizations in the United States . '' They called it `` The Health Care 500 . '' The current edition has the same format but a new title : `` The Health Care 1,000 . ''
Is Lewis Carroll 's timeless `` Alice 's Adventures in Wonderland '' simply an innocent children 's story ? Those who think so are in for a fascinating glance through the looking glass , courtesy of The Learning Channel 's `` Great Books '' series , running Saturday night . The fourth installment of the Donald Sutherland-hosted series brings the background of mathematics professor Charles Lutwidge Dodgson ( alias Lewis Carroll ) out of the rabbit hole , describing how his view of childhood contrasted with the rigid social standards of 1860s Victorian England . This program is not necessarily recommended for younger eyes , but it is required viewing for anyone who has read Lewis Carroll stories to their children . The story of the independent Alice had its genesis on a Thames boat ride on July 4 , 1862 , when Dodgson related a tale to 9-year-old Alice Liddell , daughter of the dean of Christ Church in Oxford . On Christmas of that year , Dodgson presented young Alice with a hand-illustrated copy of `` Alice 's Adventures Underground . '' The following year , he enlisted Punch cartoonist John Tenniel to illustrate the renamed `` Alice 's Adventures in Wonderland . '' That book and the follow-up , `` Through the Looking Glass , '' trail only the Bible and the works of Shakespeare as the most quoted books in the English language . The `` Great Books '' program shows many of the hundreds of takeoffs and provides a look at how the 1960s popular culture melded with the works of 100 years earlier . ( Jefferson Airplane lead singer Grace Slick , who recorded the 1967 hit `` White Rabbit , '' noted a half-dozen drug references in Carroll 's writings . ) We also see Carroll on the front of the Beatles ' `` Sgt . Pepper '' album , and a snippet from the more recent `` Don't Come Around Here No More '' video featuring Tom Petty as the Mad Hatter . Carroll , described as `` a very clever man with the heart of a child , '' is a very complex study . The author of the book that celebrates identity perhaps wrestled with his own identity . The program explores whether he used drugs or gave them to the young girls he entertained and photographed . After all , the `` Alice '' stories , unlike most books of the times , are conspicuously without morals . The master of nonsense was also a scholar of logic . Queen Victoria , after reading `` Alice 's Adventures in Wonderland , '' said she wanted to read Carroll 's next book , which turned out to be a treatise on simultaneous linear equations . Upcoming `` Great Books '' programs will study H.G. Wells 's `` War of the Worlds '' ( June 11 ) and `` The Art of War '' ( June 18 ) .
New research has found that acetaminophen doesn't reduce the pain during and immediately following circumcision . While acetominophen is safe and easily administered to newborns , the researchers said , `` the pain of circumcision is too severe to be controlled by a mild analgesic . '' Acetaminophen ( the active ingredient in Tylenol ) does seems to work against persistent discomfort at six hours after circumcision , however , according to a study by University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry researchers . The study appears in last month 's Pediatrics , published by the American Academy of Pediatrics . About 86 percent of American male newborns undergo circumcision , the most common surgical procedure performed on males in this country , the study said . Most of these circumcisions are done without painkillers . A local anesthetic procedure called dorsal penile nerve block has been found effective against circumcision pain , the researchers said , but is not widely used because of concerns about its safety , the time it takes to administer and a continued belief that babies don't feel much pain . The new study , in line with previous research , concluded that circumcised newborns do experience great and persistent pain during and after the surgery , based on crying , increased heart and breathing rates and other measurements . The discomfort from the surgery also seemed to interfere with breastfeeding in some newborns , who required formula supplements . Breast-feeding takes more-active participation on the part of newborns , who have to learn to latch on to the breast and suckle , than the more-free-flowing bottle , said Cynthia R. Howard , the lead researcher on the study . After circumcision , babies can be more difficult to awaken , and this may frustrate mothers who themselves are just learning to breast-feed , she added . Howard said she plans to follow up this study to see if there is any long-term impact on breast-feeding . The researchers concluded `` it is imperative '' that a safe and easily administered painkiller be found and used for the large number of newborns receiving circumcisions in this country .
Breast milk has long been appreciated for the nourishment it provides and for its rich supply of antibodies that help newborns fight infections . Now research suggests that breasts also produce large quantities of a hormone that may aid the development of a newborn 's brain and sexual organs , and may also affect the health of the mother 's breast itself . Scientists said the findings , which were made in experiments on rats but appear to be true for humans as well , strengthen the argument for breast feeding and may lead to new strategies for fighting breast cancer . Researchers have known for years that the hormone , gonadotropin-releasing hormone ( GnRH ) , is made in the hypothalamus of the brain in adults , where it influences sex-organ growth , the reproductive cycle and sexual behavior in rats and people . Pregnant women also make the hormone in the placenta , where it gets passed to the embryo and has a major influence on fetal brain development . Now researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovet , Israel , have found that in lactating rats large amounts of GnRH are made in breast tissues . The hormone is probably also made in human breast tissues , they said , since human breast milk has been found to be loaded with the hormone . The researchers , led by neuroendocrinologist Yitzhak Koch , propose that the GnRH in breast milk may help complete certain aspects of brain or sex-organ development left unfinished during the fetus ' stay in the uterus . Breast-milk GnRH may be especially important to a newborn rat , since rat brains are still largely undeveloped even after birth . Human brains are more fully developed at birth , so the importance of GnRH in human breast milk remains uncertain . But even human brains change substantially in the first years of life and may benefit from the hormone , Koch and others said . `` It could be important for the physiology of the developing baby , '' said Donald Pfaff , a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University in New York . But he stressed that further experiments are needed to see whether the hormone can survive in the digestive tract of a suckling newborn or is deactivated there . Sergio R. Ojeda , head of neuroscience at the Oregon Regional Primate Center in Beaverton , said researchers discovered a few years ago that breast milk contains fatty acids , which are critical for growth , and taurine , which aids in the absorption of nutrients , and that baby formula companies had subsequently added those ingredients to their products . He said GnRH may be the latest such discovery , and he predicted that further research would bring other hormonal benefits of breast milk to light . Margaret Wierman , an endocrinologist at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center , said the new finding was potentially important for women too because many breast-cancer cells grow in response to GnRH . She said studies of how the production of GnRH is regulated in the breast may someday lead to new ways of blocking breast-cancer growth . The new research appears in this week 's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
It was the surgical head nurse who turned the South African hospital upside down . She needed a gynecologist , and it made perfect sense to her to choose Dr. E.T. Mokgokong , who would soon become deputy head of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Natal . Except that it was 20 years ago at the height of apartheid and the nurse was white and Dr. Mokgokong is black . `` She caused complete pandemonium in the hospital , '' the doctor recalled . After all , it was a black hospital . Although the staff was mostly white , the patients were black . Why wouldn't the nurse go to the hospital for whites ? `` She told them : ` My gynie is Dr. Mokgokong , ' ' ' he continued . Very delicate , very shocking . He remembers her asking the disapproving white staff : `` Whose body is going to be examined ? '' That stamp of approval helped establish him in the old South Africa . It also convinced him that an academic degree and the stethoscope were the most potent weapons he could wield against the apartheid government . This month , a new era began as blacks who represent four-fifths of the population took control of the government . One of the most immediate challenges is to build a national health-care system to meet the needs of a swelling non-white population . Black children have death rates that are 12 times higher than white , according to government figures . Diseases such as typhoid and tuberculosis , rare among whites , are major killers of South African blacks . More than half the children admitted to a black teaching hospital last year were found to be suffering from malnutrition . A critical problem is the lack of black health-care professionals . Currently there are about 1,200 black physicians for an estimated population of 30 million . This compares with 25,000 white doctors for about 5 million whites . For decades Mokgokong , 63 , has been a kind of education warrior on the health-care battlefield . He heads the Medical University of Southern Africa ( Medunsa ) , founded in 1978 for black students . Last week , he was in Washington to receive an award from Medical Education for South African Blacks , a non-profit organization that funds medical scholarships . Mokgokong grew up on a farm , the youngest of seven children . His father was a teacher and Lutheran minister . At 19 , he passed the standard examinations to enter a university . After earning a science degree at Fort Hare University , Mokgokong received his medical degree at the University of Natal in 1962 . He belongs to South Africa 's pioneer black generation of `` First-&-Onlys '' : First black on the university faculty , one of the only blacks on the hospital teaching staff ; first & only black to head a South African medical school . `` First-&-Only '' pioneers ( blacks or women or members of any outsider group ) can break the barriers of the discriminating culture but not its rules . They survive and even excel by working within the system and in the process they target the culture 's limits . First Mokgokong broke the ability barrier when he decided to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology and pursue a career on the prestigious track of academic medicine . `` The early days were very difficult , '' he said . `` We were always taking the job of a white . '' Meanwhile , Mokgokong had to prove he was not only just as good as his white counterparts , but better . That 's why it was a turning point when the surgical head nurse chose him to be her doctor . He also had a mentor in the chief of the ob-gyn department . `` I became his blue-eyed boy , '' he jokingly recalled . But eventually `` First-&-Onlys '' crack up against the culture 's glass ceiling . When his department chief retired , Mokgokong applied for the director 's job and was passed over . A few years later , he crossed a personal and political Rubicon and switched to the all-black medical school . The move was highly controversial . To many in South Africa , Medunsa was seen as a tool of apartheid to keep blacks separate and disenfranchised . To some , learning itself was a form of submission . `` Liberation first , education later '' was the revolutionary slogan . But to an education warrior like Mokgokong , it was the other way around . Education equaled liberation . Spare the book , he believed , and spoil the child 's future . He consulted his political friends , some of them in exile , and got their backing to go to Medunsa because , as he said , `` the institution in the long run will be a training area for black people . '' Today roughly 60 percent of practicing black physicians in South Africa are graduates of Medunsa . While other universities are opening the door to black applicants , Medunsa remains the primary medical training ground for blacks . Yet , in the euphoria of liberation , Mokgokong is not resting on his laurels . Apartheid may be overturned , but his education war goes on . He has already started with his family . One son is a neurosurgeon , another is a general practitioner , his wife is a social worker . `` I hope we can keep our level head and not go into a dictatorship to deal with the violence , '' he said . `` The main thing is to bring back the culture of learning and teaching . ''
In what may be a new record , the most recent U.S. policy on Haiti , whose centerpiece is tougher sanctions , was declared futile even before it came into effect on May 21 . Among widely opposing views on every other aspect of Haitian policy , all sides agreed on just one point : that the still untested sanctions would not suffice to drive Haiti 's military regime from power . Administration officials , who had just devised the policy , freely but anonymously admitted as much to reporters . Supporters of Jean-Bertrand Aristide , who only a few weeks before were fiercely urging tighter sanctions , agreed . Their earlier conviction that `` sanctions had never been given a chance '' because the old set was too weak shifted almost overnight to the view that unmistakable readiness to use force was necessary . The president , listing reasons why an invasion would be in the U.S. interest , was described by aides as trying to build public support for military action . If , as seems nearly certain , the sanctions don't do the job , the administration will have far fewer options than it had a few weeks ago . A policy designed to buy time and options already seems to have achieved the reverse . Now , abandoning sanctions on the grounds that the necessary conditions for democracy don't exist today in Haiti , would seem too stark a retreat . Indefinite negotiations would seem obviously fruitless . Tightening the sanctions still further risks destabilizing the Dominican Republic and would bring unacceptable suffering for Haitians . The remaining option unless President Aristide were to voluntarily step aside is an invasion . Five arguments have been advanced in favor of such a step : that U.S. values and post-Cold War global strategy demand that we `` restore democracy '' to Haiti ; that U.S. credibility is unacceptably harmed by thugs who `` thumb their noses '' at us ; that restoring President Aristide is the only way to reduce the number of refugees heading our way ; that removing the current military leaders will reduce drug trafficking to the United States ; that only such an all out-effort can dispel charges of a racist policy . Close inspection reveals glaring weaknesses in most of these arguments . Haitian drug trafficking , for example , is not a large source of what 's on America 's streets . If that were motive for an invasion , a dozen other countries should come first . Other reasons offered by President Clinton-Haiti 's proximity , the fact that many Haitians live here and Americans live in Haiti , and the fact that Haiti and Cuba are the only remaining non-democracies in the hemisphere are accurate descriptions but hardly reasons for military action . What is noteworthy about this list is that only the first argument addresses Haiti 's problems ; the rest address our own . Making foreign policy with an eye to domestic opinion is one thing . Making foreign policy to resolve domestic concerns with only an occasional eye to the actual problems abroad is quite another , and unlikely to end successfully . `` Restoring democracy , '' therefore , is the crux of the matter . But is it also a delusion ? We can reinstate a freely elected president who is the choice of most Haitians . But a single election does not create a democracy . The election that brought President Aristide to power was an aberration in Haitian politics , made possible only by the presence of large teams of foreign observers . The political norm is rampant corruption , stolen or canceled elections , coups d' etat and violence . Democracy can only be homegrown . An established democracy that has been usurped can be restored through outside force . A fledgling democracy , receptive to the rule of law and to the right of peaceful political dissent , can be helped along . But it is questionable and worthy of a serious debate that has not occurred whether Haiti can be lastingly helped at this point in its political evolution through armed intervention . To leave behind a functioning democracy in Haiti , an invasion would have to : disarm the military ; reinstate Aristide ; prevent the traditional violent retribution against those leaving power ; create Haiti 's first well-trained , civilian controlled police , distinct from the military ; keep order for months to years ; uproot and remove antidemocractic elements of the military and economic elite ; provide massive development assistance , get along with Aristide through thick and thin ; help forge a moderate political consensus , and be prepared to re-intervene if it collapses . These tasks get harder and more dangerous as the liberators become occupiers and the large initial force shrinks to a smaller number of peace enforcers . Lives will be lost to paid and random violence . At what point would the United States declare its job done ? Invasion advocates argue that it could be very early , with the longer , harder job turned over to an ad hoc international coalition or U.N. peace-keeping force . Other countries can be expected to hold a different view . Moreover , a U.N. force would have to be vetoed by the United States , since its open-ended mandate could not meet the conditions of the president 's new peace-keeping policy . If democracy cannot be restored because it hasn't previously existed in Haiti , Americans will have to decide how they feel about military action for the purpose of keeping out refugees or as a means of demonstrating the president 's toughness . The threat to American credibility , however , does not come from Port-au-Prince . It lies in the possibility that we will start something we cannot finish out of little more than frustration , or become hopelessly tangled in a policy riddled with internal contradictions because it is principally designed to meet domestic imperatives .
WASHINGTON Some people in the federal government never get a pat on the back . Ever hear anybody loving up the IRS ( `` Gee , great tax ! '' ) ? Or the Postal Service ( `` Really quick and cheap ! '' ) ? Or the Border Patrol ( `` Boy , those people willn't dare try that again ! '' ) ? Or the U.S. . Agency for International Development , charged with administering foreign aid , one of the nation 's favorite spending priorities . ( `` Wow , I loved the way you took the $ 5 million that was supposed to pay for my children 's textbooks and built that beautiful bridge in Milcamagnesia ! '' ) . One school of thought holds that shepherding foreign aid through Congress is what transformed House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R . Obey , D-Wis. , into such a cuddly guy . Jay Byrne , AID 's press spokesman , put it another way : `` Let 's just say foreign assistance doesn't have much of a constituency . Every time you turn a corner there 's someone standing there with a baseball bat . '' In an effort to lighten up his troops , Byrne ( and others , he insists ) in March devised a `` Stress Management Program , '' a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post . The basic principle : `` You all want to stay stressed , and stress is good for moral ! '' Stress may also have caused this spelling lapse , but so what ? Stress `` helps you avoid responsibility , '' the manifesto said . `` This gets you off the hook for all the mundane chores ; let someone else take care of them . '' In other words , blame the proofreader . Byrne , 32 , once worked in former Boston mayor Raymond L. Flynn 's office , where , he acknowledged , `` people had more fun '' than they do wandering around among the egomaniacs down here . What a surprise . According to Byrne , AID has been especially stressed because `` dramatic changes '' have made the agency `` what we like to call the number one laboratory for reinventing government . '' In the Clinton administration this sort of reinvention quack-quack is slang for layoffs and budget cutbacks , but Byrne makes a convincing case that other stuff is happening , too . When last you tuned in , Byrne noted , AID was always being accused of running expensive , inefficient , hugely stupid projects whose only apparent purpose was to keep corrupt Third World dictatorships from going communist . `` When we ( the Clintonites ) first showed up , '' Byrne noted , `` nine out of 10 phone calls from journalists focused on potential abuses , dissatisfaction and misunderstanding . '' Now the communists are gone , Byrne said , `` the Cold War dictums no longer apply , '' and AID is shutting down in 23 countries . Some of these are long-term friendlies who have allegedly `` graduated '' ( Thailand , Costa Rica , Botswana ) to become `` developed countries . '' Others are short-term friendly `` graduates '' who apparently were always developed , they just didn't know it ( Estonia , the former Czechoslovakia ) . And a few are Third World dictatorships where nothing good ever seems to happen ( Zaire ) . So the good news for foreign aid haters is that we 're cutting all these countries off . Maybe they no longer need us , as AID would have us believe , or maybe we no longer need them , since nobody 's going communist anymore . Whatever , it should be noted that this is not real money . Of the $ 7 billion in the current foreign aid budget , Byrne says , only $ 2 billion is funding `` sustainable development '' projects in the Third World . The rest is either being used to keep old friends from throttling each other ( Israel and Egypt ) or to keep new friends from getting crazy ( the former Soviet Union ) . So , if you 've only got $ 2 billion to massage , tempers can get short . Also , Byrne said nobody can smoke in the office anymore , `` which has caused quite a bit of stress , '' and relations with AID 's closest associates , the State Department and the U.S. . Information Agency , remain snarly . Thus the stress manifesto recommends `` worry about things you cannot control , '' including Voice of America foreign aid editorials , which the AID press office must painstakingly read and clear , even though , `` frankly , you wonder who 's interested , '' Byrne said . The manifesto also notes that `` stress helps you seem important . Evidence : the State Department , '' but Byrne refused to expand on this statement . Later , however , he admitted that `` you are reminding me that at the time we wrote this , it was a lot of fun . '' And good for moral .
Charles Durning tucked away his D-Day memories 50 years ago . They were so painful he 's rarely unpacked them since . Durning is the only survivor of a unit that landed on Omaha Beach that June 6 in 1944 . He holds the Silver Star for valor and three Purple Hearts for wounds he suffered . He was an infantryman , only 17 . But so were the German soldiers on the bluffs above , strafing the Normandy beach from concrete bunkers that are still there . Durning survived the invasion he had to kill seven German gunners to do it and suffered serious machine-gun wounds to his right leg and shrapnel wounds over his body . Later he was stabbed eight times by a bayonet-wielding German teenager . He killed that soldier with a rock . A few months after that , he was taken prisoner at the Battle of the Bulge , survived a massacre of other prisoners , then had to return to help identify the bodies . A bullet in the chest finally ended his wartime duty . Durning endured four years of hospitalizations for his physical and psychological wounds . `` I 'd like to have a decade of my life back , '' he said . `` I dropped into a void for almost a decade . It 's your mind that 's hard to heal . There are many horrifying secrets in the depths of our souls that we don't want anyone to know about . '' Later Durning found that his brother in the Navy also had been part of the landing . The invasion of Omaha Beach was assigned to the United States ' 1st Infantry Division , to which Durning belonged , and the untested 29th Division from Maryland and Virginia . More than 70,000 men went ashore on D-Day , 15,000 of them to their deaths . In recent weeks , Durning has been unpacking his D-Day recollections . During a spring visit to Washington , he discussed his experiences guardedly . Those experiences , along with his familiar television presence , made him an ideal choice to take part in a Memorial Day event and two productions pegged to the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion . Sunday evening , Durning will appear at the National Memorial Day Concert to read a letter written by a 19-year-old American soldier describing the horror of that day . Monday night , on The Discovery Channel 's `` Normandy : The Great Crusade , '' Durning does the narration and reads a poem written by a 22-year-old paratrooper . Durning has also taped an account of the invasion by Ernest Hemingway for inclusion in a `` CBS Reports '' special on D-Day airing Thursday night and hosted by Dan Rather and retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf . Durning 's colleague from CBS 's `` Evening Shade , '' Ossie Davis , will host the 90-minute Memorial Day concert on PBS , the fifth produced for that holiday by Jerry Colbert of Pathmakers Inc. , and Washington public station WETA . This one focuses not only on the soldiers of D-Day , but also on the American nurses who served in Vietnam . In addition to Durning , concert headliners include Grammy-winning country singer Clint Black , who has written a song , `` American Soldier , '' for the occasion ; musician Doc Severinsen ; actresses Mary McDonnell and Jill Clayburgh , who will read letters written by nurses ; singers Harolyn Blackwell and Maureen McGovern ; and the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Kunzel , with a military chorus doing selections that will include Beethoven 's `` Ode to Joy . '' Brass on board are to include Gen. John Shalikashvili , chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ; his predecessor , retired Gen. Colin Powell ; and the chief of each armed service . Durning choked up a little while taping his narration for the Discovery documentary . His recitation before thousands of people at the Memorial Day concert could be an emotional challenge . He 'll be looking into television cameras , but he asked Colbert not to require him to face the war footage to be shown behind him . Concert host Ossie Davis will understand . An Army medic stationed in Liberia , he was manning the base radio station in early June 1944 when he ran into a military-news blackout . He learned about the D-Day landing from the BBC and announced it to the local troops . It was Davis who was instrumental in securing Durning 's appearance at the concert . Reminded over a lunch in April with his wife , actress Ruby Dee , and Colbert that Durning was part of the first wave onto Omaha Beach , Davis suddenly realized that his friend would be ideal to read the letter and leaped up to call the sitcom 's production office . Two weeks later , Colbert was in Los Angeles talking with Durning , who had read the script for the concert and agreed to appear . Plans call for him to leave the stage briefly to shake hands with other D-Day veterans in the audience . Like Davis and Colbert , Susan and Christopher Koch , producers of the Discovery documentary , and executive producer Tim F . Cowling thought the same thing : Durning would be perfect . But they nearly missed him . They had contacted his agent but heard nothing . `` We thought , ` He just doesn't want to have anything to do with it , ' ' ' said Susan Koch . `` We were into casting the ( voices ) , and his agent called and said , ` Charlie wants to do anything . He 'll read one line . ' We felt it was meant to be . '' It seems that Durning 's stepdaughter , as aspiring actress , had seen a copy of the script that had somehow never reached Durning and insisted he read it . After 50 years of suppressed memories , he decided it was what he wanted to do . `` We didn't get an actor , we got a Normandy veteran who happens to be an actor , and that was precisely what the film called for , '' said Chris Koch . For the actor , doing the narration stirred emotions . A careful listener may catch a tremor in Durning 's voice at times during the program . Durning and Chris Koch talked for several hours beforehand about Durning 's experiences . `` He said , ` You know , everybody who was there is in some state of denial . There are things I 'll take to my grave. ' ' ' Durning was with `` The Big Red One , '' the 1st Division , which went into Omaha Beach with the 29th Division from Maryland and Virginia . Units that ultimately formed the 29th fought in the American Revolution and both sides of the Civil War ( hence its nickname , `` The Blue and the Gray '' ) , but unlike most infantry divisions , it was and is part of the National Guard . `` We picked the 29th because they had never been in combat before , '' said Chris Koch . `` They were trained and selected to go in first . '' Durning had the bad luck to go in with them because , said Koch , `` he was a real troublemaker in basic training , he said . His CO said , ` Durning , you 're going in on the first wave. ' ' ' Among the voices in `` Normandy : The Great Crusade '' are those of actor Robert Sean Leonard as a Virginia corporal , Robert Sales ; Leslie Caron as Marie-Louise Osmont , a widow whose chateau became a German barracks , and who kept a diary ; Mariel Hemingway as American photojournalist Martha Gellhorn ( an ex-wife of Ernest Hemingway , Mariel 's grandfather ) , who landed at Omaha Beach to cover the story and ended up caring for wounded soldiers ; and Joanna Pacula as Ursula von Karkoff , an anti-Nazi German whose brothers were required to serve in Hitler 's army .
Actor Charles Durning grew up in Highland Falls , N.Y. , near the U.S. . Military Academy at West Point . His father , an Irish immigrant who had joined the Army to gain U.S. citizenship , lost a leg during World War I and died when Charles was 12 . The elder Durning 's widow supported her five children by working as a laundress at West Point . `` I never went to college ; barely got out of high school , '' Durning said . `` I finished high school when I came out of the Army . '' All along , what Durning really wanted to do was act . `` I was enamored of acting from the first time I saw ` King Kong , ' ' ' he said . `` When I saw Cagney , I just went crazy . '' At 16 , he was working as an usher at a Buffalo burlesque house that featured bawdy comics . `` They chose to believe I was 21 , '' he said of the management . After the war Durning used dancing as physical therapy to strengthen his badly injured leg , and speech therapy to smooth a stutter that had developed . He began training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts but was told he lacked talent . So he worked as a dancer and played small roles with Joseph Papp 's New York Shakespeare Company . A role in Papp 's `` That Championship Season '' on Broadway in 1973 led to one in a film , `` The Sting . '' Durning went on to do more than 70 movies . Nominated for two Oscars and eight Emmys , and the recipient of Golden Globe and Drama Desk awards , he won a Tony as Big Daddy in a 1990 Broadway revival of `` Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . '' Sometimes Durning thinks about the loss to the country wrought by war . `` Only the flower of our youth , only the best the most healthy , the brightest are allowed to go , '' he said . `` Think of all the poets , the playwrights , the philosophers , the scientists , the statesman that were lost . ''
WASHINGTON The Office of Management and Budget has announced a new pilot project designed to ease some of Washington 's chronic procurement problems , such as cost overruns and lack of competition on large contracts . The government spends about $ 105 billion each year on `` contracting out , '' buying services that range from grass-cutting and painting to highly complex scientific research and analysis . The announcement this week by OMB Director Leon E. Panetta said the pilot project would encourage federal agencies government-wide to refashion some of their existing service contracts to reflect performance-based standards . They would include price , level of competition , number of contract audits and length of the procurement cycle . `` This pilot project will help to streamline the procurement process and create a better work environment between the government and service contractors , '' Panetta said . For the experiment , agencies would convert contracts that offer ways to measure before-and-after results , and move from cost-reimbursement contracts to fixed-priced contracts . Agencies also would break up large `` umbrella , '' or multipurpose contracts that typically include a variety of routine services , such as guards and secretaries . `` I think a lot of people throughout government would agree with the observation that very frequently , in government and in service contracting , we don't do a good enough job of defining what we want out of the contractors , what performance we want , '' said Steven Kelman , the administrator of OMB 's Office of Federal Procurement Policy . Earlier this year , a survey ordered by Panetta found that the `` statements of work '' which describe the tasks or services to be purchased are often so imprecise that vendors are unable to determine agency requirements . Poor statements of work can reduce the number of bidders , limiting competition , and make it difficult to assess a contractor 's performance . Kelman , noting that `` it 's hard to write a good statement of what you want , '' said some procurement officials developed statements of work , then used them repeatedly without taking into account technological changes or lessons learned from management experiences . The pilot project , he said , will `` tighten up the system in the sense of making it more clear , up front , what the performance criteria is and what we want from contractors . '' By using performance-based standards , Kelman said , the government should be able to move to fixed-price contracts , perform fewer audits and save around 20 percent on contract costs . An `` unusually dramatic '' example savings of 43 percent was achieved at the Treasury Department when it took a cost-based contract for training and coverted it to fixed price , Kelman said .
WASHINGTON The health-care debate is not nearly as complicated as it looks . Oh yes , the details can get immensely complex and getting the details wrong could cost dearly . But what 's causing all the turmoil are a few key choices . Once those choices are made , the details begin to fall into place . The biggest choice is whether or not the United States wants a system assuring every American health insurance . This issue passes under the name `` universal coverage . '' Universal coverage is immensely popular not only among those who are uninsured but also among those who currently have insurance but fear they will lose it or see their coverage eroded as employers face ever-higher costs . So popular is universal coverage that few politicians will say they 're against it . But guaranteeing everyone health coverage will cost money . There are only so many ways to raise the money . Congress could simply raise taxes . Or it could require individuals to pick up the tab . Or it can require employers to pay part or most of the costs , as so many already do now . President Clinton 's plan puts most but not all of the burden on employers . All employers , with the exception of some of the smallest , would have to pay 80 percent of the health insurance costs for their employees , individuals 20 percent . That roughly matches the current split at companies that insure their employees . You wouldn't know it from the cowering in Congress over the dread `` employer mandate , '' as it 's known , but requiring companies to insure their employees is immensely popular . That ought not be surprising . Most people are employees , not employers . And most people think that if they hold down a job or , as is the case with so many families , two jobs health coverage ought to be part of the deal . But it is a sign of how skewed the debate is in Washington toward various business lobbies that the employer mandate has become the main sticking point in the discussion . Many Republicans and some conservative Democrats say they 'll kill any health bill that includes one . Yet most of these politicians will then turn around and also say no to new taxes , no to individual mandates , no to anything that would actually guarantee universal coverage . A courageous exception is Sen. John Chafee , R-R.I. , who favors requiring individuals to buy health insurance . As Chafee noted on `` Meet the Press '' on Sunday , `` to have universal coverage and to have the reforms that we need .. . we 've got to have some kind of mandate . '' For his candor , Chafee has gotten nothing but grief from the Republican right , which wants to use the mandate issue to stop universal coverage . What scares the Republicans about Chafee 's position is that if they concede the reality that only mandates or taxes lead to universality , the Democrats who favor employer mandates suddenly have the political high ground . Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole is very shrewd about this . `` I can already see the 30-second television spots , '' Dole told The Washington Post 's Dana Priest. ` ` ` Well , the Republicans didn't want your boss to pay for it , they want you to pay for it. ' ' ' Clinton ought to hire Dole as a media consultant . Some former opponents of the mandate among Democrats have begun to understand what Dole already knows . The conversion of Sen. John Breaux , D-La. , from firm opposition to open-mindedness about an employer mandate may be seen later as the turning point in the debate . Opponents of large-scale reform have taken to arguing that there is no need for a universal program now and that slower , piecemeal action makes more sense on a problem this complicated . This view has intuitive appeal , but may be dead wrong on health care . As Hilary Stout and David Rogers pointed out in the Wall Street Journal last week , the cost per person of providing coverage generally drops when more people are covered in larger insurance pools . Piecemeal reform could be more expensive , not less . And real cost containment is only possible once everyone is in the system . Otherwise , the providers of health care will keep shifting costs from the uninsured or the poorly insured to the well insured . The point with health reform is that you either really do it or you don't , and the key to whether it gets done is Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan , the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee . Moynihan 's discomfort with the Clinton plan is often ascribed to prickly personal relations with the White House , with Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and the like . But instead of psychoanalyzing Moynihan , supporters of health reform would do well to pay attention to what he 's written about social policy over the years for example , in his 1988 volume , `` Came the Revolution . '' Two themes are central to Moynihan 's view . One is the hubris of social reformers . Speaking of government 's exertions in the 1960s , Moynihan says that `` we should not exaggerate what we knew or what would come of what we undertook . '' What scared Moynihan initially about Clinton 's health undertaking was his plan 's complexity and the impression some Clintonites gave that they thought they had unlocked all the mysteries of health policy . But Moynihan also has an immense respect for what government can do . `` Government , '' he says , `` can embrace great causes and do great things . '' Clinton 's central task is to convince Moynihan and with him the country that universal health coverage as conceived by the administration is not an act of hubris but a practical next step in a great cause that began with Social Security and the New Deal and that has worked out pretty well .
PRAGUE , Czech Republic While former Communists and Socialists in much of Eastern Europe are riding a popular backlash against economic reforms to return to power , the Czech Republic appears to be a notable exception . This country of 10.5 million people , Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus said recently , is beginning to look like `` a small non-leftist island in the center of Europe .. . . All opinion polls show that nothing like that could ever happen in our country . '' Jiri Ryvola , spokesman for the country 's newly militant labor confederation , has many criticisms of Klaus but agrees with him on one fundamental point : Former Communists and Socialists have little chance here of returning to power , as they have in several other formerly Communist-governed states . `` It just seems unlikely to me that a similar development could occur here , '' Ryvola said . Less than five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall sent the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe tumbling like dominoes , both Poland and Lithuania have put former Communist parties back into office , and Hungary is about to follow suit , with the Socialist Party poised for a commanding victory in runoff elections there May 29 . Yet , here in the Czech Republic there is no sign that former Communists or Socialists are gathering any momentum at all , as both government and labor continue to support the drive to establish a free-market economy in the shortest time possible and seem to share a hatred for Communists , past and present . The sharing of basic views toward the reform process between the Czech republic 's only labor confederation and its political leadership has apparently not been shaken by a demonstration by 30,000 disgruntled workers on March 22 the biggest protest seen in Prague 's Old Town Square since the overthrow of the Communist regime here in November 1989 . The Left Bloc Communists , Socialists and their allies holds 33 seats in the 200-seat parliament , second only to the 76 held by Klaus 's Civic Democratic Party . But polls show the bloc currently attracting less than 10 percent of voters . Why the Czech Republic is bucking the leftward trend in Eastern Europe has become the object of considerable discussion among Western diplomats , academics , bankers and financiers . These analysts are pondering whether the Czech Republic could serve as a model of successful transformation from communism to capitalism for other Eastern European nations or whether conditions here are so specific as to make this unlikely . Right now , the prevailing wisdom seems to be that the Czechs , formerly part of Czechoslovakia before it split into separate Czech and Slovak republics in January 1993 , are a special case , with a prime minister who has devised a unique approach . Klaus , a prominent economist , prides himself on being a disciple of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher , a labor-bashing free-marketeer who despised the social welfare state . But analysts here say Klaus has in fact followed a highly statist approach toward reform that has carefully incorporated the labor unions as partners , relied heavily on social welfare measures to keep the social peace and spent billions of dollars in government subsidies in flagrant violation of free-market principles . `` It 's clearly hypocritical for Klaus to call himself a Thatcherite . He 's the biggest Social Democrat in Europe , '' said Mitchell Orenstein , a Yale University graduate researching the Czech transition at the Institute for East-West Studies here . One of the most striking features of the Czech political scene today is the divorce of the unions and leftist parties , while unions in Hungary and Poland have jumped into politics and parliament with enthusiasm . Analysts say the answer lies partly in how the fall of the Communist regime came about here more as an aftershock of the earthquake that swept the Communists from power elsewhere . The transition was so peaceful that it came to be known as the Velvet Revolution but also so brief a matter of a couple of weeks that little real reform took place within the Communist Party . By contrast , the reform process in Hungary and Poland was underway for years and affected their Communist parties as well before non-Communists finally took power in the 1989-90 general upheaval . They quickly shed their old names and ideologies as part of a general face lifting to persuade voters they had broken with the past . Here , the Communist Party is still agonizing over whether to take `` Communist '' out of its title and has failed to shake off the stigmas attached to it . `` Eighty percent of our members voted to keep the name , ` ` party Chairman Miroslav Grebenicek explained somewhat apologetically . Grebenicek readily agrees with Klaus and Ryvola that there is no chance of the Communists coming back to power here in the near future . The party , he explained , is badly fragmented , with its legislators split into three factions . But a weak , fragmented and only partially reformed Communist opposition is not the sole reason former Communists and Socalists have been marginalized here , according to Orenstein . He believes the secret to Klaus 's success lies in two strategies massive government subsidies to construct an extensive social safety net to soften the effects of wrenching economic reforms and a corporatist approach toward labor and business . Klaus has relied on such non-free-market practices as a law barring state-owned enterprises from declaring bankruptcy while they are being privatized . Yet 61 percent of 767 industrial enterprises were insolvent as of March 31 , according to press reports . This refusal to allow bankruptcies has meant that hundreds of thousands of workers who would otherwise have been laid off have kept their jobs a practice not followed in Hungary or Poland . This has cost the Czech treasury billions of dollars . Klaus has also implemented a program of make-work projects to create `` publicly useful jobs , '' such as street sweeping , to keep another 100,000 to 140,000 employed . In addition , the government pays out a `` living minimum '' wage to 300,000 or more Czechs classified as being below the poverty line . These measures have allowed the government to boast that the Czech Republic has the lowest unemployment rate less than 4 percent of any country in Europe today .
DEIR BALAH REFUGEE CAMP , Gaza Strip At the edge of the shimmering waters and brilliant beaches of the Mediterranean lie 39 acres of dreary cinder-block warrens , sandy alleys , open sewers and the dreams of 13,680 Palestinian refugees . Among them is Bassem Khaldi , 32 , a teacher , the sole breadwinner in a family of 24 people living in seven rooms and sharing one kitchen . Khaldi and his wife occupy one room with a corrugated tin roof . As much as he would like to flee this overcrowded camp , he has nowhere to go . `` Once , I dreamed of a house and a car , '' he said . `` Our dreams are something . Our hopes are something . But reality is different . I have no choice . I can't leave . I am the only one working , and I have to support 24 people . '' His predicament helps explain much about the land and people that Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat will govern when he takes over the Gaza Strip in the weeks ahead . Two out of three people under Arafat 's new domain are refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants . They are the poorest of the Palestinians , those who are most desperately in need of new housing and economic revival . Yet they may be the most difficult to help , for reasons both political and economic . The Gaza refugee camps Beach , Jabaliyah , Khan Younis , Rafah , Nuseirat , Bureij , Deir Balah and Maghazi are where the Palestinian uprising caught fire six years ago , and where resentment and pride still burn deep . A recent study of Palestinian society by a Norwegian institute found that `` the single most embittered sector of the population is the first generation '' of Palestinian men in the Gaza refugee camps . Here , Arafat remains a powerful figure . On a recent afternoon , the sun-baked walls here were resplendent with a freshly painted , elaborate Arabic graffito hailing the PLO and pledging `` All the glory to our martyrs . '' Red and green paint ran in glistening rivulets through the sand below . The name Deir Balah means `` Monastery of the Dates , '' recalling an earlier era when this was a balmy stretch of plantations . But today the refugee camp , Gaza 's smallest , is a dense honeycomb of families surviving in identical square cinder-block cells built for them in 1960 . There is 124 square feet of living space for each of the 13,680 residents of the camp . To an outsider looking at the Gaza coast , the refugee camps might seem an obvious target for razing and resettlement . But starting over with the refugees has long been problematic . For five decades , the camps were a symbol to Palestinians of what they believed was the temporary nature of their exodus . Israel sought to carry out a resettlement effort in the 1970s , and several thousand refugees took advantage of it , but there was criticism that it would mean the end of their claims to land and villages they lost when Israel was created in 1948 . The refugees ' claims are not expected to be negotiated until the talks on the permanent status of the Gaza Strip and West Bank in several years . At least theoretically , Arafat probably does not want to give up any cards or leverage before those negotiations by dismantling the camps now . But attitudes in the camps are changing , albeit slowly . The enormous pressures of decades of overcrowding and poverty have spurred a steady stream of refugees to leave the camps on their own . ( They retain their status as refugees , eligible for benefits from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency , even when they move out of the camps . ) The Gaza refugee population has grown from 200,000 in 1951 to 625,000 today , about half of them in the camps . `` In the period 1948 to 1953 , for the people who were there , ( the camps were large ) enough to accommodate those numbers , '' said Palestinian lawyer Shasabeel Alzaeem , a consultant to the U.N. agency . `` But the person who back then had one bed and one kitchen , now he is a grandfather with 10 sons . So , they cannot continue expanding . This is why so many have left . '' `` It doesn't mean they forgot Jaffa or Haifa , '' he added , referring to towns with a large pre-1948 Arab population . `` But they understand they cannot return to Jaffa and Haifa . '' `` The old people still remember the land , the village , '' Khaldi said . `` If you ask someone where they are from , they will never say Deir Balah . When we register the children in our school , we still write down the name of the original village . '' Most of those in the camp were refugees from towns and villages along the southern coast of Palestine , near what is now the Israeli towns of Ashdod and Ashkelon . `` But , to be honest , they don't feel they have a good chance of going back , '' he added . `` It 's not fair . But it 's realistic . They have no other choice . '' Salah Musa arrived in Deir Balah when he was 15 . At first he lived in a tent ; later , in a mud-brick shanty with an asphalt roof that leaked in winter rains . Musa became the mukhtar , or village leader , of Deir Balah and saw his own experience multiplied . `` Most people have been living in a crisis for a long time . The housing , the living conditions and the economy completely deteriorated . The people are psychologically broken . '' Smoking cigarettes and sipping sweet tea , Musa looked out his door at the beach and camp a striking contrast of natural beauty and man-made squalor . He said no one had forced him to remain here . He simply had no alternative . `` I haven't decided to live in a refugee camp , '' he said . `` If I find a house , a beautiful house , there is nothing stopping me from leaving . But no one came and gave me money to build a house , so what can I do ? Tell me ! '' `` The situation is completely different since 1948 , '' he said . `` Then , it was only me and my wife . Now , 35 people live here . I sure don't want to live in this house it 's crowded . I hope the Palestinians who control this place will build me a new house . '' But practically speaking , Arafat 's new government will not be in a financial position to rebuild Deir Balah or the other camps for many years , if at all .
WASHINGTON To say the pickings have been slim of late for builders of commercial airliners would be to exaggerate . But there may be help on the horizon because of the slowly improving condition of the airlines and because of something called the Airport Noise and Capacity Act of 1990 . The noise act says that every large commercial jet in the United States has to meet quieter `` Stage 3 '' noise requirements by Dec. 31 , 1999 , and 1,223 of the 3,335 jets in service today are in violation . Given a two- to three-year lead time between placing an order for an aircraft and taking delivery , the orders for aircraft are going to have to start coming in soon , manufacturers hope . Just as quieter planes would be a change for people living along airport flight paths , it also would be a change for those who make the planes . According to a recent survey by the magazine Airline Business , the Big Three of the commercial aircraft manufacturing world had exactly zero net orders in 1993 , with Airbus Industrie and McDonnell Douglas Corp. actually having more cancellations than orders and Boeing having only 33 planes on the plus side . Altogether , Boeing 's latest market forecast , released Monday , projects the worldwide market for aircraft having between 70 and 170 seats at about 3,000 planes by the year 2000 . That combines replacement of older planes and additions to airline fleets . That 's actually down about 2 percent from last year 's forecast , according to Richard L. James , Boeing 's marketing vice president , but he says it will be more than enough to keep all three manufacturers ' lines humming , once airlines break out of the doldrums into which they have dropped over the past two or three years . Assuming they do , replacement of noisy planes will be part of the equation . While the formulas are complex , Dale McDaniel of the Federal Aviation Administration says that , in terms of total noise impact on a community , `` you could have 10 Stage 3 operations before it would equal one Stage 2 . '' In 1990 , 2.7 million people were exposed to an average of 65 decibels or higher over a 24-hour period . `` That is non-compatible with residential use . By 2000 , that will down to 400,000 , '' McDaniel said , although those in the path of those aircraft might not be happy no matter what the noise stage classification . The deadline `` provides some continuing stimulation . The fact that it remains a target continues to drive ( airlines ) to modernize , '' McDaniel said , adding a dash of fiscal reality by noting that now the airlines `` just have to have the funds to do it . '' The dramatic losses of the past three to four years have led almost every major U.S. carrier and many foreign ones not only to stop ordering new planes but also to cut back on existing orders . USAir disclosed last week , for example , that it is delaying delivery of 40 planes and forgoing options on another 70 . Yesterday , British Airways , which still is making money , said it is placing no new orders this year and is letting options expire on 25 Boeing planes . `` Downsizing '' has been more of a buzzword in U.S. airline planning circles lately than growth . But smaller fleets do not mean orders for new aircraft can be shelved forever , especially with the noise deadlines looming . Most airlines plan purchases several years in advance and last-minute orders often can be very expensive , especially if the market begins to tighten up . Boeing 's James said airline balance sheets `` are coming back into balance now . A lot of carriers are stirring and looking beyond immediate quarter . We are at a low point in terms of orders . In 18 months to two years , the books should turn . ''
WASHINGTON Who would have thought a high-tech security system developed to protect the Pentagon 's nuclear arsenal would be safeguarding a huge stockpile of blue jeans ? Thanks to ever-cheaper microchips , a rudimentary form of artificial intelligence developed by GRC International Inc. of Vienna , Va. is being used by Gap Inc. to keep thieves or other intruders out of its warehouse in Edgewood , Md. , which serves Gap stores from Maine to Florida . Given the ungainly name of `` automated assessment signal processor '' by GRC , the device is what 's known in the computing world as a neural network a system that mimics the human brain 's ability to take in lots of information from the body 's eyes , ears , nose and skin but discard most of it and focus only on what 's important . And it can learn to distinguish between nuisance noise wind ; birds , raccoons and other small animals ; rustling leaves and noise that should trigger an alarm : unauthorized entry by people . It 's taught by being presented with and told to ignore simulations of certain sounds . It can be hooked up to a variety of sensor systems microwave , radar , fiber optic that create electronic fences around property . It interprets the information that those sensors are constantly collecting . Since being installed four months ago to protect a warehouse 14 acres in area , `` It 's paid for itself many times over , '' said Gap security supervisor Jim Toscano .
WASHINGTON It was a gray day in Red Square when Chris Ihlenfeld dropped to one knee and proposed to a Russian woman he 'd met four days earlier . At the cobbled foot of St. Basil 's onion spires , Anastasia Fedorchoukova smiled sweetly down at the divorced computer technician from Northern Virginia . She said yes . They married six months later , on March 25 at the Arlington County , Va. . Courthouse. Now , amid coos and cuddles in a small apartment with a large stereo , the young couple is living a fantasy that started with a magazine ad their very own Russo-American dream . The Ihlenfelds ' union is a product of the growing mail-order bridal bazaar that has sprouted since Soviet Communism died . With Soviet emigration barriers dismantled , about 350 Russian women entered the United States last year as fiancees of American men . In 1988 , only 11 women came from the Soviet Union to marry Americans . The Ihlenfelds ' marriage is the first arranged through Berel and Natasha Spivack , an American-Russian couple from Bethesda , Md. . The Spivacks are cashing in on the lucrative business of showering Washington with brides from Russia with love . Last July , the Spivacks started a business called Encounters International to introduce American men to Russian women . More than 50 Washington area men , many of them federal employees , have come to their office and grazed through photo albums and videotapes of about 300 Russian women . Two couples have married , six are engaged , and others are busily faxing letters and pictures back and forth , sifting for true and everlasting love . About every two weeks now , another Washington area man travels to Moscow and becomes engaged . That heavy traffic to Russia is a new wrinkle in the Washington dating scene , where the oversupply of single women is legendary . Magazines and gossip columns regularly wail about the imbalance between eligible women and men in the nation 's capital . Still , the Spivacks ' male clients are shelling out $ 3,000 to $ 4,000 to search for romance in a cold , gray city 5,000 miles away . In several interviews , American men and Russian women involved in the program struck remarkably compatible themes . The men said they are sick of career-obsessed American women running to the subway in business suits and tennis shoes . The women said American men were more likely than Russian men to treat them as equal partners . `` I was tired of American women , '' said Ihlenfeld , 24 , sitting on his living room couch , stroking his 22-year-old wife 's long , blond hair . `` All they cared about was their work . '' According to an Encounters International flier , Russian women are `` much less materialistic '' than American women , as well as `` more willing to follow their husband 's lead '' and `` more appreciative of men . '' They also have `` old-fashioned traditional family values that are getting harder to find '' in America , the flier says . On top of that , the brochure says , the `` dating scene in Russia is almost non-existent , and a woman over 22 is considered past her prime . Wars and alcoholism have taken their toll on eligible Russian men and created a large number of single women .. . . Many beautiful Russian women dream of having an American husband . '' There are tough requiremements for those women , who must pass entrance interviews with the Spivacks ' staff member in Moscow . Women are accepted only if the interviewer deems them reasonably slender and attractive , if they are 17 to about 55 years old , have one or fewer children and speak some English . Natasha Spivack said 600 to 800 women have applied to the service , but only 300 have met the qualifications . Men using the service range in age from 22 to 71 , but they are mostly in their forties , and many are divorced . There are no specific eligibility qualifications . `` When I knew him more , I really began to love him , '' she said . The Immigration and Naturalization Service has found no particular problems with American-Russian marriage services , spokesman Richard Kenney said . He said women entering the country on a `` fiancee visa '' must be married within 90 days , and they are granted permanent resident status after two years . `` Home free , '' he said . Some marriages between American men and Russian women make sense , according to Harley Balzer , director of the Russian Area Studies Program at Georgetown University . Balzer said many Russian men do not consider women equal partners in marriage . `` Even men I know who write about women 's rights wouldn't get up from the dinner table to clear the dishes , '' he said . Balzer said the struggle of single women has been a common theme of the most successful Russian movies of the last 20 years . `` You 've got this funny situation where the American man is looking for an unliberated woman , and the Russian woman is looking for a slightly more liberated man , '' he said .
Magazines , especially women 's magazines , have been hot on the Hillary Rodham Clinton story for a year and a half now , delivering not much of interest . This week 's New Yorker brings the first truly heavyweight piece on the First Lady , but before we get to that , a few tips on how to prepare for reading it . First , go to your local newsstand and look at the June issues of Working Woman and the American Spectator , which basically represent the poles of current thinking about the First Lady . You don't have to venture beyond the cover of either to know what lies inside . The cover of Working Woman offers the headline `` Hillary Hangs Tough '' plus a flattering photo of the First Lady in a sensible business suit , poised patron saint of Uber-women everywhere . On the American Spectator 's cover , Mrs. Clinton is drawn as a witch , malevolent and defiant as she sits astride a jet . Inside is David Brock 's version of the White House travel-office scandal of last year , the latest installment in that magazine 's crusade to show that Hillary is the antichrist of American politics . Is the First Lady good or evil ? Ponder deeply now , for it seems to be the question of the hour . The last several days ' photos and film footage of Jacqueline Kennedy flawlessly doing the First Lady 's job the old way have made Mrs. Clinton 's chameleonism all the more unsettling . To further unsettle yourself about her situation , next read Leslie Bennetts 's account of an interview with an edgy , angry Hillary in the June issue of Vanity Fair . No big news here , but Bennetts 's sporadic references to her dealings with Hillary 's handlers will tell you everything you need to know about the state of the First Lady 's relations with the press . One flack hovers nearby throughout the interview , demanding at one point that a benign exchange on Vince Foster be retroactively taken off the record . Bennetts declines . What are we to make of this First Lady of a thousand faces , overexposed in every medium in the land yet somehow still unknowable , willfully and perhaps wisely withholding parts of herself from inquiring minds ? Enter Connie Bruck , whose lengthy cover story in this week 's New Yorker looks to be the new yardstick by which magazine profiles of Hillary Clinton will be measured . Titled `` Hillary the Pol , '' this exhaustively researched piece portrays her basically as the CEO of the Clinton political partnership , the shrewd operator who resurrected his ( and their ) career after he lost the Arkansas governorship in 1980 , and who in many ways still guides it today . It 's the Hillary you may have believed was there all along , behind the multiple facades : hyper-intelligent , opportunistic , relentless in pursuit of her own political agenda . Bruck traces the First Lady 's political skills back to Arkansas . In one instance , she describes how , after Bill 's gubernatorial defeat , Hillary set out to neutralize an Arkansas newspaper columnist who had been an antagonist of Bill 's . Hillary wined and dined the man , and he left Clinton alone for years . There are many other such stories , but the message is always the same : She had her idealistic vision for improving the world , but she also did what it took to reach short-term goals along the way , whether they were political , legislative or financial . Mrs. Clinton didn't have time to be interviewed for the piece , we learn , but the president was able to give Bruck nearly two hours . What does that tell you ? At one point Bruck raises the possibility that Hillary might even seek to succeed Bill in his current job : `` Some friends have suggested that her goal now may well be to become president herself , '' Bruck writes . `` Betsey Wright ( Governor Bill Clinton 's chief of staff ) told me last December , `` There are a great many people talking very seriously about her succeeding him . Their staff will say , `` We have to do it this way and that way , and then we 'll be here at least twelve years . '' And it 's not just the staff . Friends , Democrats , people out across the country think it is a very viable plan of action. ' ' ' Since The New Yorker came out Sunday , Wright has denied saying that , but The New Yorker is standing by the story . In Bruck 's account of Clinton 's health care reform task force , the portrait 's especially severe ; the First Lady seems so certain of her own correctness that she will brook no criticism . `` In the end , that sureness about her own judgment at its extreme , a sense that she alone is wise is probably Hillary 's cardinal trait , '' Bruck writes . The Jackie model of how to be the president 's wife died with her . Maybe what we see in Bruck 's piece are the outlines of a new First Lady paradigm that , for better or worse , we 'd better start getting used to .
WASHINGTON Andrew W. Mellon was exceptionally rich , and the Soviet Union broke , when , in the spring of 1930 , Mellon bought a 500-year-old painting for $ 500,000 right out of the Hermitage . For an additional $ 6,154,000 he soon got 20 others , by Raphael and Rembrandt , Titian and van Dyck , Chardin and Velazquez , but none gratified him more than the first , a panel from an altarpiece by the early Netherlandish master Jan van Eyck of Bruges . Its condition was deplorable , its companion panels lost , its scale unexceptional . Van Eyck 's `` Annunciation '' ( c. 1434/1436 ) is less than 15 inches wide . Still , the purchaser believed , and not without good reason , that he had bought a monument of European art . For more than 50 years , that narrow , beat-up painting would be displayed in the museum Mellon gave his country , the National Gallery of Art here . Then it was taken down . This week , after two years in the lab two years of careful cleaning , high-tech examination and painstaking repair it goes on view again . The picture seems reborn , though it will never again look just as van Eyck made it . Still , its dull varnish is gone , its bold blues have their brightness back , and its many missing paint flecks there were hundreds , maybe thousands have been seamlessly filled in . The picture 's conservation was primarily conducted by the gallery 's David Bull , a former museum director ( he used to run the Norton Simon in Pasadena , Calif. ) who has a scholar 's eye and a sure , rock-steady hand . Look as closely as you wish at the in-painting he 's done , and try to find a flaw . Gabriel , the archangel , smiling with delight , has just appeared to Mary to announce the Incarnation . His angelic salutation , Ave gratia plena ( `` Hail , full of grace '' ) the letters writ in gold floats out of his mouth like a holy exhalation . The scepter that he holds is of rock crystal , not glass . Van Eyck was a magician . What one cannot quite believe is the physicality of his sight . The capitals that crown the columns in the picture have been carved so finely with interweaving tendrils , complex Celtic strapwork , with warriors and with steeds that you feel each chisel mark . Gabriel 's garments , too , are endowed with such tactility that you somehow know the softness of their velvets , the stiff weight of their threads of gold , the slightly gritty gleamings of their countless sewn-on pearls . Even from an inch away , van Eyck 's surfaces don't fall apart into streaks of paint . His manner has uncanny depth ; his details on details go on and on and on . `` He knew fabrics like the weaver , from whose looms they have flowed , '' wrote the scholar Max J. Friedlander , `` buildings like an architect , the earth like a geographer , plants like a botanist . '' `` From the sheer sensuous beauty of a genuine Jan van Eyck , '' agreed Erwin Panofsky , the Princeton iconographer , `` there emanates a strange fascination not unlike that which we experience when we permit ourselves to be hypnotized by precious stones or when looking into deep water . ''
HOLLYWOOD There was a memorable moment in `` Beverly Hills Cop '' when Eddie Murphy 's Axel Foley jammed a banana in a parked police car 's tailpipe . Walking out of `` Beverly Hills Cop III , '' you may be moved to ask , `` Anybody have a banana for this movie ? '' The existence of this film is a testament to star power or , to be more precise , recycling power . We 're supposed to be so grateful to once again see Eddie Murphy as Axel that we can overlook how crude and shopworn this picture really is . It 's one of the most cynically engineered sequels ever . The kicky appeal of the `` Cop '' series at least potentially has always been the idea of a street-smart black cop from Detroit who outmaneuvers the ( mostly ) white Beverly Hills honchos who underestimate him . It 's a neat racial joke that provided a few chuckles in `` Beverly Hills Cop '' and virtually none in its hyper-powered , Stallone-ish sequel . Stallone , in fact , was originally supposed to star in `` Beverly Hills Cop , '' and the series has never gotten very far from his over-muscled shadow . For most of the way in `` Beverly Hills Cop III '' ( MPAA rated R ) we might as well be watching any old standard-issue action hunk dodging bullets and lobbing grenades ( and , in a masterstroke , saving children in peril ) . But Murphy gives us less than those action hunks do ; he 's playing out his own fantasy image of a righteous avenger , and the fantasy is essentially humorless . There 's little trace of his gift for con-man mimicry . It 's as if he set out to trash his own franchise . Once again Axel , wearing his Detroit Lions jacket , is brought back to Beverly Hills from Detroit to track down the killers of a close associate . And once again he gets propelled into shootouts and car chases with a clan of murderous nasties , headed by John Saxon and Timothy Carhart . Their base of operations is a theme park called WonderWorld , which how 'd you guess ? features a dinosaur ride . `` Jurassic Cop , '' anyone ? The Beverly Hills police force retains series regular Judge Reinhold , who now has his own office and his own SWAT team . Bronson Pinchot also turns up again as the oddly accented Serge . He has graduated from an art gallery to a boutique selling personalized luxury weapons , which is a fair way of gauging how far the inspiration in this series has dropped . At a time when police detective shows on television are better than they ever have been , what excuse is there for the slovenliness of `` Beverly Hills Cop III '' ? Director John Landis and screenwriter Steven E. de Souza ( who worked on `` 48 HRS. '' and the `` Die Hard '' films ) are strictly smash-and-grab guys . Like the other films in the series , this one has no muscle tone ; it wobbles opportunistically between wan slapstick and routine bang bang , with lots of gratuitous cheesecake for scenery . It 's not easy to make audiences laugh at a comedy where characters are actually shot on camera . And , in the post-Rodney G. King era , a racially tinged film involving cops and violence in Los Angeles carries a lot of unwanted baggage . Taken simply as pure action , the mayhem in this movie may be routine but , in the context of a knockabout comedy it 's deeply offensive . The film begins with a bunch of workmen in a Detroit auto shop shimmying to a record by the Supremes . The scene is played for broad , dumb laughs ; then , in a scene that 's not played for laughs , they get bloodily ventilated . But it 's near the end , when the assorted good guys wobble and collapse into frame with their wounds , that the corruption of this enterprise sinks in . There 's a fundamental lack of human feeling in `` Beverly Hills Cop III '' that makes you want to avert your eyes from the people around you when the lights come up . Attending this movie makes you feel like an accomplice to the corruption .
HOLLYWOOD When the editor of Tricycle , the Buddhist Review , one of the few journalists allowed on the set of `` Little Buddha , '' the new Bernardo Bertolucci film , wrote about her experience , one question continued to trouble her . What was the word `` Little '' doing in the title ? None of the filmmakers , it turned out , could give her a satisfactory answer , but now that the picture itself is here , the reason seems obvious . Despite its illustrious pedigree , `` Little Buddha '' turns out to have the sensibility of a children 's film , the most elaborate and expensive `` Afterschool Special '' ever to make it to the big screen . Being a children 's film , of course , is not necessarily a negative thing , and aspects of `` Little Buddha '' ( MPAA rating : PG ) do linger pleasantly in the memory . But what lingers as well is the suspicion that this is a children 's film at least partly by default , the product of too much goofy New Age reverence and too little nuance and sophistication . Those who remember such Bertolucci films as `` The Conformist '' and `` Last Tango in Paris '' may be surprised at this turn in his career , but those pictures are deep in the director 's past . More recently we 've seen the likes of `` The Last Emperor , '' which , its many Oscars notwithstanding , is best remembered for how everything looked , not for what anyone said . In fact , especially when , as here , Bertolucci collaborates with Vittorio Storaro , one of the world 's preeminent cinematographers , the director has a tendency to become a prisoner of his own particular gift for luscious images , to assume that the dramatic side of things will more or less take care of itself . Story , however , can be neglected only at great risk , especially when two parallel tales are being told . The first begins in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in modern-day Bhutan , where Lama Norbu ( Chinese actor Ying Ruocheng ) gets a telegram he 's been waiting for for nine years , a message that soon puts him on a jet headed for Seattle . Though all Buddhists believe in reincarnation , only Tibetan Buddhists believe that specific people , invariably great teachers , can be identified in their next incarnation . And Lama Norbu has reason to believe that his own teacher , admittedly a man with a hell of a sense of humor , has been reincarnated as an 8-year-old American named Jesse Konrad ( newcomer Alex Wiesendanger ) . Not surprisingly nonplussed by this news are Jesse 's parents , Lisa ( Bridget Fonda ) and Dean ( singer Chris Isaak ) , a sprightly young couple who don't quite know what to make of all these robed and shaven monks appearing suddenly in their lives . They don't object , however , when Lama Norbu gives Jesse a child 's life of the Buddha . This little book forms the basis of `` Little Buddha 's '' second narrative strand , a film-within-a-film set in Asia 2,500 years ago that details how the fun-loving Prince Siddhartha transformed himself into a great spiritual being . Though it plays at times like an infomercial on Eastern religions , this half of `` Little Buddha '' is the most successful . For one thing , this is where Storaro 's photography and James Acheson 's production and costume design are at their best , making good use of the never-before-seen streets of Bhutan and creating opulent set pieces . And though eyebrows and even entire faces were raised when it was announced that Keanu Reeves was going to play Siddhartha , in fact , he does what the part calls for as the golden youth shielded from misery and death who takes the path to enlightenment . Hewing closely to traditional texts , this part of `` Little Buddha '' comes off closest to the fable quality the filmmakers were apparently after . In the modern half , however , the lack of texture that is the film 's weakest link is most evident . The Mark Peploe and Rudy Wurlitzer plot , from a story by the director , seems determined to take the drama out of every situation , while the accompanying dialogue is invariably hollow and unconvincing . Being blissed out may be an enviable state for a human being , but it is not necessary the best one for a film .
Bernardo Bertolucci may not know anything more about Eastern religion than I do , but I don't care . This is not to say his `` Little Buddha '' is inaccurate , either in its portrayal of Tibetan Buddhist thought or the life of Siddhartha ( Keanu Reeves ) , only that it doesn't really matter . What matters is what happens on screen , and Bertolucci 's direction alone is the stuff of religious conversion . The director , whose philosophical questing has taken him to China and North Africa in recent years ( for `` The Last Emperor '' and `` The Sheltering Sky '' ) has filmed his latest in the holy lands of Nepal , Bhutan and Seattle . And in telling his based-on-real-life story about a blond 9-year-old who is suspected of being a reincarnated lama and juxtaposing it with an epic recounting of the life of Prince Siddhartha who will become the Buddha Bertolucci reverses the tired conventions about ancient religions and religious life and in the process evokes a very contemporary yearning for spirituality . That he cannot sustain the tone of serene momentum that opens the film is perhaps inevitable ; once the seduction of the viewer is accomplished there 's a certain leveling-off of passion . But the beginning of `` Little Buddha '' has moments so full of magic it 's surprising how much of it is accomplished through simple humor . The Buddhist temple in Bhutan , where the film opens , is not the forbidding place of popular imagination . It is a center of learning , of warmth and of children instructed by Lama Norbu ( Ying Ruocheng ) , who invites questions and makes jokes . His beatific demeanor changes only after he gets a letter saying that the reincarnated spirit of his late teacher , Lama Norje , has been located . In Seattle . `` Lama Norje had a great sense of humor , '' says Kenpo Tensin ( Sogyal Rinpoche ) , one of the jolly monks who have determined that blond , Gameboy-playing Jesse Conrad ( Alex Wiesendanger ) has been chosen by Norje for his reappearance . Jesse likes the idea , likes the gentle Lama Norbu , and gives signs that he may actually be Lama Norje . But it 's no joke to his parents ( Bridget Fonda and Chris Isaak ) , who have made no provision in their yuppie life-plan for a Buddhist invasion . Where `` Little Buddha '' falters , and it does , lies in the casting . As Jesse 's fatherInvalid face , Dean , who takes Jesse to Bhutan , Isaak has the unformed face and personality to make him truly American , and truly flat . Likewise Reeves , whose lighter-than-air screen presence is appropriate for the young , naive Prince Siddhartha , but who in the end doesn't provide anything very substantial . The ancient Indian sequences are full of miracles , outlandish visuals and ornate religion , but the modern world defines the film 's spiritual impact . Bertolucci says that godhead isn't about myth and trappings , but about yearning as defined by the faith of monks , or perhaps the unfilled need of secular Americans . `` Little Buddha , '' in its gentle way , probes that cavity . Three stars . Invalid face
Eddie Murphy has been telling interviewers , in no uncertain terms , that `` Beverly Hills Cop III '' is not his comeback film . And he 's right . A strictly paint-by-numbers , action-adventure yarn , with little sense of humor and even less sense of purpose , `` Beverly Hills Cop III '' effectively nullifies Murphy 's main asset comedy in favor of making him another Sylvester Stallone . Which is not something we desperately need . At the same time , it defuses the whole dramatic premise behind the first two `` Beverly Hills Cop '' movies ( the first of which was vastly superior to the others ) , which was Axel Foley as bureaucratic victim a streetwise Detroit detective , a cop out of water , defying the uptight , rulebook-bound Beverly Hills police to fight the good fight . He was smarter than your average underdog . Now , he just seems rude . When Axel gets to Beverly Hills this time around , he 's chasing a gang of cop killers who eluded him in Detroit after an opening shootout that 's a good example of both false advertising the action 's never this hot again and director John Landis ' debauched way with movie violence . Bullets and blood are sprayed with equal abandon , cars and humans are liberally riddled , and each slug ends its trajectory target with a fat , soft thud . Much like the jokes . The Secret Service doesn't want the gang caught ; they 're up to uncovering something much bigger , apparently , than the killing of Detroit cops . Axel is unmoved , not caring who or what he demolishes en route to getting what he wants . He 's like a cop with a multipicture deal . The pursuit takes him to WonderWorld , a Disneyland knockoff inspired by the Walt-like Uncle Dave ( Alan Young ) and under the de facto control of Ellis DeWald ( Timothy Carhart ) , the ruthless killer Foley is chasing . That this one deliciously perverse aspect of `` BHC III '' is not exploited for anything close to its subversive potential is symptomatic of the movie 's failings . Disney-facists vs. the state . It could have been great . But `` Beverly Hills Cop III '' lumbers on its way to a predictable , and predictably violent , conclusion , with Axel 's BH buddy Billy Rosewood ( Judge Reinhold ) consistently befuddled , Detective Flint ( Hector Elizondo ) trying to protect his post-retirement job at WonderWorld , Bronson Pinchot reprising the unpronounceable Serge , who 's now in the personal security business , and some shamelessly cheesy action sequences . Theresa Randle , as the WonderWorld worker sympathetic to Axel 's cause , is really the sole cast member worth watching . Whether `` BHC III '' signifies anything in terms of Murphy 's career is moot ; the actor hasn't had anywhere to come back from , not if you 're talking box office . Even when he 's turned out incendiary devices like `` Harlem Nights '' or `` Boomerang '' he 's made money . Artistically , of course , it 's another story . He hasn't really fulfilled his comedic potential since .. . well , maybe the original `` Beverly Hills Cop . '' But it clearly doesn't bother him . If Eddie Murphy felt he had anything to prove , he wouldn't have done Part III of a movie series that had already run out of gas , wouldn't have hooked up with as lame a director as Landis , and certainly would have read Stephen de Souza 's script ( you don't think he actually read this script .. . ? )