Sometimes when you're not getting any breaks, you've got to make your own. To its credit, Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. did just that by settling on new three-year contracts with the United Steelworkers of America. After nearly six months of talks, the parties averted...

The prospects for peace in Bosnia are beginning to seem somewhat brighter. Foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia met in New York City in Sep 1995 and agreed on the basic elements of a constitution. A peace force will be sent to the...

It has been twenty years since Knowles' classic A Separate Peace first appeared. Now the author returns to Devon, that same New Hampshire boys' school, for his latest novel, Peace Breaks Out. While World War II provided the background for the Gene and Phineas story, in the new novel the war is over and a Devon graduate, Pete Hallam, returns from the war to teach history at the school. Devon serves as a place for Pete to rest and halt time a bit as he tries to sort out a broken marriage and the...

Despite several virtues—some good writing and good observations about how boys live at school—"Peace Breaks Out" suffers from its author having told such a similar story so much better before [in "A Separate Peace"]. A moral mystery of this kind requires, if not the first-person narration of the earlier version, then at least a unified point of view. I suspect Knowles once meant to provide one in the person of his teacher and at some point sensed that his teacher is...

Twenty-one years of real time have passed since John Knowles wrote his classic, A Separate Peace. Three years of novel time have passed with the emergence of the companion book Peace Breaks Out. It is 1945, the war is over, and Pete Hallam returns to Devon as an instructor. He needs to regain his perspective on life and recover from the war, his wounds, and a broken marriage. Hallam's attempt at a retreat is thwarted when two students clash in his first class in American history, and a power struggle...