The IRA, disarmed at last? By FOSTER Thursday, October 25, 2001 Partly as a result of the ghastly events of Sept. 11, the Irish Republican Army may be on the cusp of a major, if overdue, shift in its basic strategy...

THREE-FOURTHS of the Senate has flocked to a proposal by Finance Committee Chairman Lloyd Bentsen and committee Republican William Roth to restore and expand the IRA, or Individual Retirement Account, curtailed by the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The administration, though not supporting this...

[Deus Irae] may well be the worst book I have ever read. It struck me as something Tom Wolfe might produce if he were to crossbreed Walter M. Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz with a twisted version of Pilgrim's Progress. Deus Irae centers around a pilgrimage to find God, the God of wrath, and the pilgrim in the book encounters many portents and has many visions as he sticks to the straight and narrow: hence the resemblance to Pilgrim's Progress. Furthermore, the book describes monastic l...

Philip Dick and Roger Zelazny's co-production, Deus Irae, lavishly strews wheezes, rather than ideas. Post-atomic, fragmented, monster-laden world; sardonic religion, the Servants of Wrath, idolizes Carl Lufteuful, the man who pressed the ultimate button; limbless painter sent on pilgrimage on cowpowered cart to find the Holy Face; various encounters with weird philosophical beasts, machines, mutants and metaphysics. Much irony about the relativism of religion and morality, somewhat in the style of J...