ANDREW J. BACEVICH Mr. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University. A World Transformed, by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft (Knopf, 568 pp., $30) OFFERING us the Bush years as George Bush wishes us to remember them,...

MARY AMOROSO The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 12-31-1998 GRAND ILLUSIONS -- IF YOUR NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS HAVE BEEN LACKING IN RESOLVE, TRY AIMING SMALLER By MARY AMOROSO Date: 12-31-1998, Thursday Section: LIFESTYLE Edition: All Editions -- 2 Star B, 2 Star P, 1...

Cards sailed through the air to the rhythm of Chopin, and a rabbit _ predictably _ was pulled out of a hat as contestants from China to the Virgin Islands on Monday kicked off the World Championship of Magic. The...

I interviewed Wayne Barrett, whose new book, Grand Illusion, tries to strip Rudy Giuliani of his post-9/11 mythic stature. Barrett interviewed people in the Giuliani administration who said the '93 World Trade Center bombing and terrorism in general never came up. Terrorism is also missing...

Above all, in La Grande Illusion, we find lucidity and innocence. We find these qualities everywhere in Renoir, but never under such stress, for here they are not only signs of a style, but maneuvers in a gathering war. Are they the right maneuvers? We are bound to ask the question, regardless of our aesthetics, because we are being asked to agree and to act, as well as to admire…. [La Grande Illusion] is a persuasion: it tries to turn us away from Z and toward A, and from this turning proceed the re...

[When La Grande Illusion was made,] the film was a warning of the futility of war in the face of growing wars, an anatomy of the upheaval of 1914–1918 to show contemporaries how grim machineries had once been set in motion. Today its pacifist intent, as such, seems somewhat less salient (though no less moving) because so many more human beings know how futile war is and know, too, that no film can abolish it. Today the film seems a hard perception of inevitabilities, not glibly cynical but, in the la...

Surprisingly enough, in these combustible times, the French have produced a war film under the title "Grand Illusion."… [It] serves to warn the British that they no longer have a monopoly upon that valuable dramatic device known as understatement. Jean Renoir, the film's author and director, has chosen consistently to underplay his hand. Time after time he permits his drama to inch up to the brink of melodrama: one waits for the explosion and the tumult. Time after time he resist...