Word: kauffmanns
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...infallibility of the Establishment, the virtues of sobriety and conformity, as well as Fred and Ginger, Lucy and Ricky, Mom and apple pie. The American empire was no longer propelled by imperial visionaries but rather by doubting, probing, experimenting empiricists. Assessing the message of The Graduate, film critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote, "Life, today, in our world, is not worth living unless one can prove it day by day, by values that ring true day by day." The Graduate was the top-grossing film...
...more than a year, the hostages never saw daylight. Their only diversion was reading the handful of books provided by their jailers; Kauffmann read War and Peace more than 20 times. At one point, he and Seurat listened while their Shi'ite captors spent eight days torturing an Arab suspected of being a spy. When it was over, Kauffmann's jailer joked, "I damaged him a little. He had two broken ribs. We broke both his legs. Finally he talked, and we set him free." Freedom, Kauffmann learned, was a euphemism for death...
...March 1986, the Islamic Jihad announced that it had "executed" Seurat. It seems likely, however, that he succumbed, at 39, to his disease. But the jailers told the hostages he was alive and recovering in a hospital. Kauffmann later learned from a radio newscast that Hallat, doomed by his captors' rabid anti-Semitism, had been executed. Kauffmann, Carton and Fontaine were continually moved from apartment to apartment. At one point Kauffmann was wrapped in bandages like a mummy, sealed in a metal box and bolted under the chassis of a truck. When he banged on the side, he was told...
...another point Kauffmann and Fontaine were tied together and placed in a coffin. When they were let out for a moment, Fontaine peered under his blindfold and saw that they were near a cement factory. "They're going to kill us here, put our bodies in cement and dump us in the sea," said Fontaine. Later Kauffmann and Fontaine were put in a new cell and chained like animals to a spike in the floor...
...When Kauffmann, after dozens of false hopes, was finally about to be released, a guard approached and told him it was all over. "What does that mean?" he asked. "Liberty," said the guard. Given the double meaning of that word, Kauffmann's greatest fears and hopes ricocheted through his emotions until the last second of captivity. Driven to an empty field, Kauffmann was joined there by Carton and Fontaine. Arriving a few minutes later at a hotel in Beirut, Kauffmann heard a French voice shout, "French intelligence services! Clear the way, for God's sake!" The ordeal was finally over...