The New Republic

Last week MGM released a "special edition" extended version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti western from 1966. The concluding chapter of the "Dollars trilogy" (following on the heels of Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More), it involves the hunt by three ruthless men (Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef) for a hidden cache of gold coins in Civil War era Texas. READ MORE >>

Lincoln's Constitution By Daniel Farber (University of Chicago Press, 240 pp., $27.50) READ MORE >>

As the early-spring rush of video releases is abating, we will dig back a few weeks to take a look at another misconceived romantic comedy, the pointlessly titled Something's Gotta Give. (Anyone hoping, as I was, that this might be a sly reference to the most memorable line in the famous 1992 "Seinfeld" episode "The Contest" will be disappointed.) It's tempting to describe this Diane Keaton-Jack Nicholson vehicle about late-in-life love as a bad movie. But that would be giving it too much credit, because it's hardly a movie at all. READ MORE >>

SON FRÈRE (Strand) I’M NOT SCARED (Miramax) READ MORE >>

The curtains drawn, all rectangles are blue. Four morning pigeons wheel in the school glue. I hate the treacherous light of December. Cold. I eat pumpkin soup out of the blender. The central heating grumbles: “You, get out.” Right. I put on my coat and off I go where the salted red herring of the pavement waits for the imminent snow. Trot, trot along, you, unbuttoned biped, across a skeleton of rusty tracks, with others clutching in hand their steamy paper cups- their secular candles. READ MORE >>

THE EYE OF THE LYNX: GALILEO, HIS FRIENDS, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN NATURAL HISTORY By David Freedberg(University of Chicago Press, 513pp., $30) READ MORE >>

SINCE THE 1960S, WHEN Michael McClure imagined Billy the Kid humping Jean Harlow in The Beard and Barbara Garson had Lyndon Johnson whacking Jack Kennedy in MacBird, it has grown obvious that actual people, often still among us, have become the grist of American playwriting. In one recent week alone, a musical opened by Michael John LaChiusa called First Lady Suite, featuring Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, and Mamie Eisenhower, along with a semi-fictional comedy by A.R. Gurney called Mrs. Farnsworth, about a Vassar woman who may or may not have been impregnated by George W. READ MORE >>

There are a million stories in the naked city, but there appears to be only one story in Washington, D.C. Have you ever read a book set in the capital that was not related to government? Whereas any romantic entanglement, murderous scheme, or cloying period piece may be set in New York City, a plot set in Washington is by and large one of official intrigue, albeit involving a pretty girl. When was the last time you read a romance set in the cafes of Dupont Circle, with no conspiracy in the background? READ MORE >>

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ONE EVENING LAST OCTOBER, Mark Fisher, a nineteen-year-old student at Fairfield University in Connecticut, who had gone into Manhattan with friends, met a girl in a bar on First Avenue on the Upper East Side, got separated from his group, and was found dead the next morning on a Brooklyn sidewalk, his body wrapped in a yellow blanket, five gunshot wounds in his chest. According to a long article in The New York Times, Fisher's case remains unsolved mostly because no one who was with him that night seemed to want to tell the police everything that they knew. READ MORE >>