Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Japanese: ), also known in many European editions as Furyo (俘虜, Japanese for "prisoner of war"), is a 1983 British-Japanese wartime drama film directed by Nagisa Oshima, produced by Jeremy Thomas and starring David Bowie, Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Takeshi Kitano and Jack Thompson. The screenplay by Oshima with Paul Mayersberg was based on Sir Laurens van der Post's experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war during World War II as depicted in his works "The Seed and the Sower" (1963) and "The Night of the New Moon" (1970). Sakamoto also wrote
The New York Review of Books in "Harper's", where Silvers was then an editor, in a special issue that he edited called "Writing in America". Her essay was an indictment of American book reviews of the time, "light, little article[s]" that she decried as "lobotomized", passionless praise and denounced as "blandly, respectfully denying whatever vivacious interest there might be in books or in literary matters generally." The group was inspired to found a new magazine to publish thoughtful, probing, lively reviews featuring what Hardwick called "the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy, the intransigent, and above all, the "interesting"". During the 1962–63 New York City newspaper strike,