Word: randomly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Although the official reason for the visit is the unveiling of a plaque, most of Diana's time is spent on a walkabout and chitchat with random members of the crowd. As the student orchestra saws out reverent tunes, she helps a boy with a speech impediment through the arduous business of telling her he loves her and hopes to see her soon again. To a handsome student who sports a box cut despite his straight hair, she says, "I think we should exchange hairdos." Nice, and just naughty enough. He and his post-Mod buddies preen like princelings...
...young, gifted and black in America today is to live poised on a cruelly honed knife-edge. There are doubtless more opportunities than ever for bright, ambitious kids to escape the ghetto. But the chances of being wasted by random violence have also increased. In his remarkable debut film, BOYZ N THE HOOD (as in neighborhood), writer-director John Singleton, 23, maps gang-ridden South Central Los Angeles with a cartographer's cool realism. But what gives powerful resonance to his film -- whose opening was accompanied by shootings in theaters across the U.S. that left at least one dead...
Fishkin proposes a bold antidote: flying a random sample of the entire electorate to a single place, where they would meet face-to-face with the presidential candidates and debate the issues. Then, and only then, would the group be polled on its preferences. Such a reform, if effected, would combine the democracy of the modern primary system with the firsthand knowledge of candidates that old-time party leaders brought to the nominating process...
Peter Benchley's 1974 best seller, Jaws, starred the shark that ate Long Island, became a smashing film and inspired a school of sequels. After some dry runs, the novelist has taken the plunge again. Beast (Random House; 350 pages; $21) features tentacles rather than mandibles. Otherwise it is the familiar mixture: lethal creature, relentless pursuers and vast quantities of saline solution. When waters off Bermuda become the killing grounds of a giant squid, tourism collapses. Whereupon an Ahabian fisherman, Whip Darling, clambers into a submarine and leads the hunt. All the old ingredients are present, from aqua horror...
...interest weekly, plus 50% of the show. As events hurtle toward opening night, agitations grow and Ben becomes more and more indecisive until, like Hamlet, he begins having conversations with his late father. Fortunately, they are witty exchanges by two convincing characters. Then again, in The Best Revenge (Random House; 240 pages; $20) everyone is convincing. Along with Tennessee Williams, novelist Sol Stein was a member of the Playwrights Unit at the Actors Studio. His portrait of backstage back stabbing is as uncomfortable as it is amusing, but Stein obviously knows what he is writhing about...