Word: warlords
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...Like Hairspray and Piazza, and a hundred others I could name, The First Emperor is a remake of a movie for the musical stage. So let's talk first about The Emperor's Shadow. It dramatizes an episode in the legend of the warlord who united the disparate Chinese tribes in 310 B.C. and ordered the erection of what would become the Great Wall. (Zhang told another fable of the first Emperor in Hero.) His name has a dozen transliterations, but we'll settle for the Met's spelling, Qin Shi Huangdi ? and, from now on, call him the warlord...
...sensitive friend who will become the musician Gao Jianli ? think Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien in Angels With Dirty Faces. Both are suckled by Jianli's mother and raised as brothers. When they're 10, they're separated for pursue their different and colliding destinies. In maturity, the warlord (played with a bull-headed majesty by Jiang Wen, China's leading movie actor) hears than Jianli (Ge You, a stalwart of several Zhang Yimou films) is enslaved by a rival clan; he sends one of his lieutenants to defeat the clan and return with Jianli. He needs a theme...
Said Ali, 21, is a volunteer fighter for the Shabab militia, the feared enforcers of the Islamic Courts Union. The U.S. brands the organization as an ally of al-Qaeda; in reality, it is also a nationalist anti-warlord movement that contains many Muslim moderates and has no international ambitions. He was 11 when he left his village in southern Somalia and traveled to Mogadishu to look for an education. But all public education had collapsed with the last functioning government in 1991, leaving private school the only option. And Said Ali, like most of his generation, was unable...
...places. But then it became only a place for killers, and for 14 years I could not visit." Though they lived in a port city a mere 15 minutes walk from the shore, "some of my children had never seen the sea," Fanah adds. When the Courts removed the warlord's blockades that had barricaded the city into tiny, heavily armed enclaves, he took his kids to the beach. " 'Why is all this water?' my boy ask me. I had to explain...
...Mogadishu was once the center of East African trade, an Italianate city of universities and cafes on the Indian Ocean waterways that link Africa with the Arabian peninsula. Since the collapse of the last functioning government here in 1991, it has been better known as a crucible of bloody warlord anarchy, where 18 American soldiers lost their lives in 1993, and where journalists still visit at their peril. You don't move without an escort of gunmen, you don't stop anywhere for more than a few minutes, you keep your tinted windows closed and you drive to the limits...