Word: sleepers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Liberal Racism (Viking; $21.95), Jim Sleeper argues that liberals' flirtation with race-based politics has exacerbated racial divisions and weakened the left's clout. "Liberalism no longer curbs discrimination," he writes. "It invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents it." Some of Sleeper's chosen targets for rebuke can mystify, but others are worthy, such as the often patronizing treatment of blacks as victims or the cynical redrawing of legislative maps to ensure the election of minorities to public office. Sleeper, a self-described liberal, calls on blacks and whites to "let race...
Shipler in particular should be commended for tireless and nuanced reportage. But there is a hollowness in each of these books. Sleeper's book will probably provide more ammunition to color-blind conservatives than to the liberals he intends it for, while the exhortations of Coleman and Shipler--that white Americans should look within and take up the cross of racial healing--will appeal mainly to those who already have. That three ambitious, intelligent books should fail to break much new ground suggests, sadly, how difficult thinking and writing about race in an innovative way has become for most Americans...
...where is Broadway to find its next long-running musical smash? This season's sleeper could be Jekyll & Hyde, a high-minded, Les Miz-style show based on the classic horror tale, which has been touring the country (and having its songs recorded) for a couple of years. But head of the class among the new arrivals is The Life, a dark, brashly entertaining musical about the seedy denizens of Times Square circa 1980, from composer Cy Coleman and lyricist Ira Gasman. It is, moreover, one new musical that really shows the impact of Rent. The Life...
...culture, anyhow. In Ira Levin's 1976 book The Boys from Brazil a zealous ex-Nazi bred a generation of literal Hitler Youth--boys cloned from cells left behind by the Fuhrer. Woody Allen dealt with a similar premise a lot more playfully in his 1973 film Sleeper, in which a futuristic tyrant is killed by a bomb blast, leaving nothing behind but his nose--a nose that his followers hope to clone into a new leader. Even as the fiction of one decade becomes the technology of another, it's inevitable that this technology will be used--often...
...replicating an animal from the dna of fully developed cells is "far beyond the reach of today's science." The next technological step, he notes, might not be too far off. "Suddenly the possibility of cloning a new human from a dictator's nose, as in Woody Allen's Sleeper, is no longer strictly in the realm of fantasy," he says. "If these techniques worked for Dolly the sheep, they will probably work for humans...