The publication this year of Prisoner Of State-The Secret Journal of Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang  contains important insights into modern China by a leader who for almost 15 years played a key role in the management of its economy. Tienanmen Square events in mid-1989 sidelined Zhao, but party-state governance has probably worsened since and his observations recorded before his death in 2005 are useful to any student of China.

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Once again Quentin Tarantino has managed to produce the impossible: ‘an anti Holocaust film’. The Holocaust film genre can be grasped as a realistic cinematic representation of the ‘Jewish victim’ (innocent and harmless individual) confronted with the ultimate brutal bureaucratic murderous ideology known as Nazism. 

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Of all the stories of celebrity deaths blown my way by media none slammed body and soul like John Lennon’s passing. Not the Kennedys. Not Elvis. Not Ken Kesey, whom I knew, not Martin Luther King, not Cronkite.

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In the wealthy American society, we have the luxury and freedom to value strange things. So be it. Few indicators of what the society values are more telling than whom we mourn when they die. Recently, the deaths of singer Michael Jackson, the actor Patrick Swayze, and Sen. Ted Kennedy have captured much media attention.

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