Word: moderns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Lenin would be mortified by modern China. Think things over? The place is changing so fast that the Chinese like to say, "He who thinks is lost." In China it's all about reaction. At the nation's heart is a tentatively beating, market-based economy, and keeping it alive puts every other goal--even mass atheism--in distant second place. That's why there's such a complex struggle with religion. China's leaders think a little faith can help the country grow--by serving as a bulwark against social unrest and the ennui Chinese call huise wenhua...
...French, it seems, are trying to revive their old reputation as a culture that is smart and naughty about sex. The modern version of French postcards is French cinema--not of the frothy old ooh-la-la sort but so serious that watching a woman caress a man's genitals is like taking an anatomy final at the Sorbonne. Four recent French films of high pedigree have featured sex that goes well beyond soft core. One, Catherine Breillat's Romance, has just opened here. Now we'll see if France and America speak the same dirty language...
...Star Called Henry (Viking; 343 pages; $24.95), Roddy Doyle's new novel about the birth of the modern Irish nation, begins with the vivid miseries of its hero, young Henry Smart, who is named for a dead brother whom his grieving mother can't forget. The time is the turn of the century, a dreary hiatus between a past of colonial starvation and a future of war and revolution. Henry's father, a one-legged Dublin bully-boy who free-lances as the doorman at a brothel, can't support the family, so Henry runs wild, stealing from shopkeepers, sleeping...
After Rwanda and Kosovo, another dark page of modern history is being written in East Timor by the Indonesian army. It's a shame the international community did not react faster in condemning Indonesia and preventing the genocide, which has been ongoing since the mid-'70s in East Timor. Above all political and economic considerations, the international community should never forget that the brave people of East Timor are struggling (and dying) for something that is so dear to all of us: freedom. MIGUEL LUCAS Lisbon...
...grandmother when she realized that everything on the radio was no good. Her grandmother, besides being her best friend, gives her her grandfather's old Chuck Berry records. Consequently, Alexandra rues the day that rock 'n roll died, and wishes everybody had at least four Chuck Berry albums. Until modern music stops sucking, until it stops sampling old music and starts being original, it can do without her patronage...