Bill Maxwell
Humanity's evil haunts grounds at Auschwitz
OSWIECIM, Poland, Sept. 18 -- When I told colleagues, relatives and friends that I was going to Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe for vacation, the reaction was always one of incredulity.

Letters
Bible's gender roles were prophecy
I was impressed by David Brewster's perceptive article, Men created gender inequity, not God, Sept. 24.

Editorials
Our role in the world
Neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush has adequately addressed the issues of foreign policy and national security that will confront the next president.

Martin Dyckman
Dizzy from the revolving door
TALLAHASSEE -- In Joseph Heller's satirical classic, Catch-22, some U.S. servicemen form a black-market company to work both sides of the war. They contract with the Allies to bomb a bridge and with the Germans to defend it.

Philip Gailey
When abortion is the issue, reason is a victim
The Food and Drug Administration's approval last week of the abortion pill RU-486 is sure to further inflame the abortion debate. The rhetoric will get uglier on both extremes and reasoned debate will be drowned out.

Books
Mysteries
FILM STRIP by Nancy Bartholomew (St. Martin's Press, $23.95) -- Sultry Sierra Lavotini is a Panama City stripper/sleuth set on solving what appears to be Mafia-orchestrated murders of sister exotic dancers who'd hoped to make it big in films. Forget the plot (you will five minutes after reading it anyway) and enjoy the zany troupe of co-stars who populate her high trailer- camp lifestyle, including her hairless chihuahua, Fluffy and lover man John Nailor, a local homicide detective. This is a laugh-out-loud look at Florida a go-go, with the added attraction of pole dancers and corpses.

Graceful contemplations of the sacred and mysterious
"Something sacred and mysterious connects us all ...," writes Gabriel Horn in The Book of Ceremonies: A Native Way of Honoring and Living the Sacred.

A lyrical look at a gritty bad girl
Throughout Glory Goes and Gets Some, you feel like the sheltered cousin at the family reunion who is stuck seated next to the bad girl of the clan. And she's talking about all the nasty things she's ever done. You don't have to ask any questions. The words are just spilling out of her. Not that you would ask anything anyway. After all, you tell yourself, you don't really want to know about sex, drugs, alcohol and addiction or that she is HIV positive.

Uniting the States
You think the Internet revolutionized information transmission? So now you can check your personal stock portfolio from your laptop while you wait for a latte at Starbucks. Big deal.

A window on Cuba
The first novel by Cuban-born Ivonne Lamazares is as deeply but jaggedly faceted as the homeland it describes. There is texture, surprising and varied enough to lose oneself happily in detail. There is unrelenting brightness, simultaneously cheerful and searing to the eye -- or to the soul. Human motives are so tangled that no one character can navigate them all. Some isolate a thread and pursue it with single-minded dedication. Others find themselves quite literally at sea without a compass.

The strange things we do for love
J.J. Smith lives for world records. He eats, breathes and memorizes statistics on the largest, the longest, the shortest, the tallest, the fastest, and he can recite them at the drop of a hint that somebody cares. J.J. is an authenticator for The Book of Records.