New Republic

Survivors of traumatic events, Primo Levi once observed, fall into two groups: "those who repress their past en bloc and those whose memory of the offense persists, as though carved in stone, prevailing over all previous or subsequent experiences." Levi himself belonged to the second group, as does the author of "The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia," an utterly compelling but nearly unbearable account of the evil that humankind is capable of.

Andrew Sullivan resigned as editor of the New Republic magazine Friday, saying he wanted to do more writing and start a "new phase" in his life. The Washington Post reported that Sullivan told colleagues he is HIV positive. But he said he has known he had the virus that causes AIDS for nearly three years and remains in good health, the paper reported. He said he is resigning because five years of editing the contentious magazine is enough.

To the extent that this has been a land of liberation for many, but also a land of unfulfilled dreams for the American underclass, it is about time someone wrote a book that recognizes the profound ambiguity represented by our sidereal symbols standing alone on islands awash with hope and despair: the Statue of Liberty on one coast, Alcatraz on the other. The social value and the legal validity of affirmative action programs have been undergoing intense scrutiny during the past year, and that process is certain to intensify as the presidential sweepstakes gain momentum.

Liberalism has had a strange career. In the 18th and 19th Centuries, the American struggle against English monarchy and Southern slavery had a liberal purpose in republican government and freedom from domination, and in the 20th Century the Progressive movement sought to bring the economic power of corporate capitalism under democratic control.

Vaclav Havel, who helped Czechoslovakia break free of communism but as president couldn't stop it from splitting in two, was elected president of the new Czech Republic on Tuesday. A playwright who led the 1989 "Velvet Revolution," Havel was Czechoslovakia's first post-Communist president and remains the best-known Czech politician at home and abroad. Even many of his opponents said they could imagine no one else as the new republic's first president.

Mickey Kaus' "The End of Equality" is a book of almost perfect self-in-dulgence, like an absurd cocktail-party rant--which would be fine were it a gourmand's guide or an erotic novel. Unfortunately, it passes for this season's hot political theory or, as the cover proclaims, a new agenda for the Democratic Party. Forget the S&L and junk-bond scandals, ignore the flight of American manufacturing and breathe hardly a word about the national debt.

Haider Abdullah leaned back in his makeshift market stall and pointed to the red television set beneath his arm. "This?" he said with a toothy grin. "It was free." Business is booming at the Thieves' Market in Kabul these days thanks to lawlessness in the streets. Widespread looting and car theft have accompanied the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

For roughly the annual salary of a single American scientist, American Telephone & Telegraph has hired 100 Russian researchers at a prestigious Moscow physics institute, the company said Tuesday. Separately, Corning Inc. said it had signed a similar deal involving 100 scientists at two research centers in St. Petersburg. The agreements are part of an accelerating effort by U.S.

BUSH-ISMS: President George Herbert Walker Bush in His Own Words compiled by the editors of the New Republic (Workman: $4.95, illustrated). President Bush's statements limp across the page, as if their crippled clauses had been injured in accidents and never quite healed. It's fun to imagine a sophomore English teacher reading this hilarious, snide compendium and trying to diagram such mal mots as "I think in politics there are certain moral values. I'm one who--we believe strongly in pluralism . . . but when you get into some questions there are some moral overtones.

Introduced as a "hero of world peace" by House Speaker Thomas S. Foley, former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev appealed to Congress on Thursday to approve economic aid to the former Soviet republics to prevent them from sinking back into totalitarianism.