It was a soldier's story, set in battlefields of rotted corpses and the tortured soul of a young teenager who went off to serve his country, and when the novel was published in 1991 it brought Bao Ninh the closest thing in Vietnam to instant literary celebrity.

Ninh never published again - although he is believed to have finished another novel about the war, called Steppe, that he has hesitated to submit for publication.

'I stopped myself. I kept holding myself back,' Ninh told The Observer in a rare interview at his home in a section of central Hanoi favoured by middle-ranking officials. 'I compared everything I wrote to everything I wrote in the past, and it's not natural like it was before.'

The long silence from one of Vietnam's best-known authors is telling of the enduring sensitivities about the war with America. Washington and Hanoi have committed to a path of reconciliation. President George Bush spent the weekend in Hanoi, discussing...

BRACCIANO, Italy -- The romantic 15th-century castle where Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes exchanged vows in a lavish ceremony Saturday belongs to a family whose ancestors include a former pope and once hosted princes, though in modern times it has seen its share of celebrity wedding.

The medieval Odescalchi Castle belongs to the noble Odescalchi family, whose ancestors include Benedetto Odescalchi, the 17th century pope Innocent XI.

It once hosted princes but is used nowadays for conventions, gala dinners and receptions for up to 1,400 guests.

The castle has had other brushes with modern celebrities. CNN international correspondent Christiane Amanpour and the former U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin held their 1998 wedding reception there, attended by 180 guests including the late John F. Kennedy, Jr.

Gold,” a mostly riveting exhibition that opens today at the American Museum of Natural History, is the museum’s latest show-and-tell about a precious natural material. Its predecessors have been devoted to amber, diamonds and pearls. Taken together, these exhibitions form a genre at which the museum excels.

The formula, executed here by James D. Webster, overseeing curator of the exhibition and chairman of the museum’s division of earth and planetary sciences, and Charles S. Spencer, chairman of its division of anthropology, goes as follows:

Using art, artifacts, natural samples, wall texts and mural-size photographs, weave together narratives about the material’s formation, its effect on the course of history and its uses by artists and artisans. Lace with startling facts and fascinating vignettes (a link to Spanish sunken treasure, for example). Throw in a few comparative displays that verge on installation art. Lure visitors in one end and wait for them to...

"Shadow and Memory" a collection of Christopher Barnes photographs of Ellis Island’s un-restored buildings will soon go on display at the immigration center, highlighting the effort to rehabilitate the 30 dilapidated structures on the island's south side.

When Ellis Island closed as an Immigration Center in 1954, many of its buildings were left to rot. The main building was finally restored and opened as a museum in 1990, but most people don't realize the other half of the island remains badly in need of help.

Barnes photographs, dating to 1986, expose the decay and hint at the forgotten past of the immigrants who spent time in the hospital, situated on the side of the island closest to the Statue of Liberty.

The non-profit group Save Ellis Island has been working to stabilize and restore those buildings and plans to reopen the 1930s-era"new" ferry building in early April. Save Ellis Island is making progress on the exhibit design and will soon start fabrication, Dorothy...

Tears rolled down Marianne Monjau's cheeks as she watched a short film of John F. Kennedy's famous 1963"Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in West Berlin at a new permanent exhibition to the slain U.S. president.

Monjau, 64, had been a student in Communist East Berlin when she heard a live radio broadcast of Kennedy's stirring affirmation of support to the city trapped precariously in the middle of Communist Eastern Europe, and watching his speech at the new museum brought back a flood of tearful memories.

"He was revered by all of us all over Berlin after that," said Monjau, who later got a Kennedy silver half dollar from a friend in Poland and has held onto the coin for 40 years."That speech gave us so much hope. It made me cry then too."

The brief film of Kennedy's eight-hour visit to West Berlin on June 26, 1963 -- where he was cheered by millions on the streets and outside the city hall where he gave his speech -- is a centerpiece of the exhibition called"The Kennedys".

Here’s a message for premium-cable auteurs. For your next gritty series, forget organized criminals, Old West horse-traders, even agents in Hollywood. Instead, consider a truly radical clique: the Puritans.

That odd little band, whose eccentric and sine-qua-non American accomplishments we celebrate next week, gets a tantalizing hearing Sunday on the History Channel’s “Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower.”

The show is nominally a documentary, but it is as full-dress as a Bob Fosse production. Betraying (as usual) no nervousness about the place of re-creations in nonfiction programming, the History Channel flaunts a huge and talented, if barely credited, cast; elaborate set design; music cues; and makeup that convincingly suggests scurvy, among other New World transformations.

In fact, with all this Spielberg stuff, “Desperate Crossing” would simply look like a television movie, perhaps one “based on the writings of William...

When the New-York Historical Society opened an extensive exploration of slavery in New York last year with an ambitious exhibition, it began to transform how New York remembers itself. The city, of course, always had its riots, its social traumas, its eruptions of unrest, but wasn’t New York (at least in our cosmopolitan imaginations) immune from systematic associations with history’s more deplorable practices? If not always a model of tolerance, didn’t its growth as a port, its importance as a center of international commerce and its churning population of immigrants and aspirants lead to an enduring liberality of spirit?

Perhaps, but that first exhibition, “Slavery in New York,” surveyed the impact of slavery from the colonial period until its abolition in 1827. It demonstrated that the enslavement of Africans was not alien to New York’s past but an essential part of it; slavery was indelibly linked to the labor that built New York and the trade that nourished it.
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With “Bobby,” Emilio Estevez, writer and director (as well as one of a huge ensemble of actors), sets himself a large and honorable task. It is important to appreciate this in spite of his movie’s evident shortcomings.

Intentions do count for something, and Mr. Estevez’s seem to me entirely admirable. He tries, by means of the familiar technique of weaving together story lines connected only by coincidences of time and place, to produce a feeling of collective life. Beyond that, he tries to link the intimate stories of nearly two dozen characters to a large and consequential public event — the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy — and to capture the heady combination of anxiety, anger, hope and idealism that supposedly characterized the United States in 1968.

All of the action in “Bobby” takes place at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 4, 1968, the day Kennedy, a late entry into the presidential race, won California’s Democratic primary. (It was also...

BEL AIR, Md. (AP) -- A professor at Catholic University is working on a one-man play depicting one of Harford County's most famous sons, who was eclipsed by his younger brother John Wilkes Booth.

Gary Sloan, an assistant professor of drama at Washington's Catholic University of America, will read "Haunted Prince: The Ghosts of Edwin Booth" at the Harford County Courthouse in Bel Air on Saturday.

Edwin Booth was born in 1833 and raised at his family's estate outside Bel Air, now known as Tudor Hall.

Edwin was one of the most renowned Shakespearean actors of his day - once performing "Hamlet" for 100 consecutive nights in New York City - but with three words and one gunshot, his brother leaped to far greater prominence in American history as Abraham Lincoln's assassin, said Dinah Faber of the Harford County Historical Society.

"After the assassination, Edwin personally felt he wouldn't be able to continue his...