Susan M. Matarese. American Foreign Policy and the Utopian Imagination Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. x + 164 pp. $28.95. A COLLEAGUE ONCE ASKED ME whether I would recommend Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland for her American twentieth-century novel survey. She...

Circles, directed by Shanti Thakur, 1997, 57 minutes, 45 seconds, video/film. Distributed by the National Film Board of Canada (in the U.S.: 800-542-2164). Order no: C9197 120. Imagine a circle based on healing where you could confront the person who hurt or abused...

The Matarese Circle, the eighth of Ludlum's popular novels, is 601 leaden pages long. Out of reviewer's hangup, I grimly read each one. Slaughter, mayhem, rape, and everyday sadism are casual events. In the first 100 pages, I tallied six murders, a pornographic episode, three instances of mayhem, and two of sadism. Since the flow of blood and the crunch of limbs quicken in the remaining five-sixths of this lumpy volume, it is conservative to estimate a grand total of at least 36 homicides, and...

What if there were an organization more sinister and powerful than the Mafia, the Central Intelligence Agency, the K. G. B. and Coca-Cola rolled into one? That's the pleasant if slightly shopworn premise of Robert Ludlum's hefty new thriller ["The Matarese Circle"], which pits the joint talents of a C.I.A. operative and a K.G.B. killer against a Corsican terrorist group that may have been behind the murders of such diverse worthies as Archduke Ferdinand and Leon Trotsky. Now they...