Word: gravely
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Books: White Man's Grave is a novel of wickedness...
Richard Dooling is impartially derisive in his caustic second novel, White Man's Grave (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 386 pages; $22). He chucks a custard pie at every face that shows itself. There's Randall Killigan, an Indianapolis attorney who glories in the dismemberment allowed by bankruptcy law: the wrenching of great financial chunks from the carcasses of not-quite-dead companies. And there's young Boone Westfall, newly employed to reject legitimate claims at his father's sleazy insurance company. "Why do you think they call it work?" Dad asks, when Boone objects that cheating widows and orphans is tedious...
...United States' reaction to North Korea's initial public move towards nuclear arms--its withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty--was to send defensive hardware to Japan. Only grave concerns about North Korea's potential for belligerency could have caused the U.S. to send arms to Japan, a nation whose growing economic predominance has been grudgingly accepted by Americans...
...SPREADING LABOR UNREST IS also testimony to the difficulty of converting a welfare state, with cradle-to-grave protections for workers, to what Beijing's leaders call a "socialist market economy." China may boast one of the world's fastest-growing gross domestic products -- GDP shot up 13.4% in 1993 and at nearly a 13% annual rate in the first quarter of 1994 -- but at least for the short term, the process of converting to a market economy has cost China many more jobs than it has created. State-run factories, which still employ more than two-thirds of China...
...Western powers have not used what meager authority they have to force the factions into more humane behavior. The U.N. Security Council two years ago asked the five-member Commission of Experts to investigate reports of atrocities. A year ago, after the panel concluded that "grave breaches" of international law had been committed, the Security Council created an 11-judge international court to deal with them. Little has happened since. The judges "are like firemen polishing their engines, waiting for a fire," says an international lawyer. They have prepared rules of procedure and evidence, but the court's offices...