Word: sorghum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Aden Abdulrahman Mohammed believed the worst was over when the U.S. Marines arrived a year ago in his village just north of Baidoa. He had managed to reap a good harvest of sorghum, set up a water pump and construct a small chicken farm. Then suddenly in November, the bad old days returned. A dispute about two stolen camels between rival subclans quickly escalated into a hit-and-run war. When the shooting stopped, 15 villages, including Asha Farto, lay in smoking ruins. All the sorghum stored by the farmers had been looted or torched, and when the seasonal rains...
Moreover, there are positive role models for Asian men. In traditional Chinese thinking, learning and negotiation were the preferred paths to true manhood. More modern roles can be found in characters like "My Grandfather" in Red Sorghum or Wittman Ah Sing in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey and in the work of writers like David Mura, Gus Lee and David Wong Louie. They are not always the heroes we would like them to be, but they are appealing, active, sexual, powerful people...
...rains have been plentiful, and the sorghum is growing. Still, in southern Sudan the old, the young and the weak are dying of starvation: a frail child is barely able to share a meager meal with his father at a feeding center; a desperately weak man stares at a bowl of water; another is huddled by the remains of a fire with a packet of rehydration salts. As earlier in Ethiopia and Somalia, this famine is in part the result of civil war. Initially the fighting pitted the Muslim government in Khartoum against Christian rebels in the south...
Today Zhang Yimou is China's ambassador to sophisticated moviegoers. He is a world-class artist who gives his films (Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern) heartbreak and visual grandeur. But people do not see Zhang's films so much as they read them, like fortune cookies, for signs and omens about the interior life of a forbidden country. Forbidden to him as well: the Chinese authorities have withheld release of some of his films. And yet Zhang still works in his homeland, against all odds and with great grace. Just like the heroine of his spare...
...worth saving, since the title role is played by the radiantly sullen Gong, who has starred in all of Zhang's features and who was declared best actress at last year's Venice Film Festival for this portrayal. As Qiu Ju or Ju Dou, as the bride in Red Sorghum or the balky mistress in Red Lantern, Gong has brought life and body to the director's ethereal cinema style. The Story of Qiu Ju relies even more on her personality than the team's earlier films. There Gong was swathed in luscious silks and period exoticism; here...