January 24, 1993

Croatian forces and breakaway Serbs were trading fierce artillery and small-arms fire near the Adriatic port of Zadar. Page 12.

FREUD, JUNG, AND HALL THE KING-MAKER The Historic Expedition to America (1909). By Saul Rosenzweig. Illustrated. 477 pp. Seattle: Hogrefe & Huber Publishers. $27.50.

YOU wouldn't know it by looking at the Dow Jones industrial average, and certainly not by studying the performance of I.B.M., but this is a wonderful bull market. Technology stocks are hot and the speculative juices are flowing. One sign of that is the runaway stock, the type that goes straight up on a little business success and a lot of hope for the future. Such tales used to be confined to the smallest of stocks, the type that had a total market capitalization of $20 million or so. In those cases, it doesn't take much buying to push up a price, nor does it take much enterprise to come up with a story that the company could grow to be worth 10 times as much.

Once upon a time, America dreamed of itself as a singing fairy tale for grown-ups, with a happy ending. Norman Rockwell painted this storybook country, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein 2d wrote its songs. More than just pop confections, they added up to a kind of secular catechism that sweetly but firmly instructed people on the rules of behavior in a world where America knew best and good triumphed over evil. Certainly, Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't invent the code of values that their songs taught. With their stern, semioperatic melodies and know-it-all lyrics, they offered an idealized mirror image of American middle-class morality in the heady afterglow of Hitler's defeat. At a moment when everyone understood what was meant by terms like "maturity," "good citizenship" and "mental hygiene," they helped define the notion of a national culture.

Dr. Robert Sawyer, a Denver surgeon, has a full-time office manager to get approval from insurers to perform operations. He also speaks to the companies every couple of days himself to report on patients' progress, spending about an hour each day on the phone justifying his patients' care. In the case of a patient whose extensive intestinal bleeding prompted a two-month hospital stay, he fielded daily calls from her insurance company requesting minute details: the volume of urine she had produced and the drip rate of her intravenous lines.

IN a television studio on the West Side, video cameras and monitors surrounded a set that had the look of a chic laboratory, with beakers filled with colored liquid. A 46-year-old woman with her hair in rollers, wearing a baggy black sweater over zebra-striped leggings and no makeup, emerged from the bustling crowd of camera operators and technicians. "Hello," she said to a visitor. "I'm Georgette Mosbacher."

IT is rare enough to sight a building nearing completion in New York City. On Fifth Avenue, however, there are two: a 30-story office tower at 46th Street and the 20-story Takashimaya Building, between 54th and 55th Streets, which will house a specialty shop, art gallery and restaurant, as well as offices. These new structures stand as proof -- at least to their developers -- that the avenue's commercial allure is undiminished, especially in the international market.

AS soon as the Giants hire a coach, perhaps we can all get serious about truly vital affairs. I have never seen so much energy expended trying to come up with a figure who will materialize only 16 Sundays a year and otherwise spend his time like a surly mole in concrete bunkers underneath a stadium in the swampland. No, it is time to get back to the more socially redeeming task of helping our laggardly baseball owners find themselves a new commissioner. We must all take part in the democratic process because the new commissioner will belong to all of us, kind of a national court jester.

His job in peril, William S. Sessions, the Director of the F.B.I., summoned reporters to his office today for an impassioned 90-minute defense of his conduct, saying he was the victim of a political attack and false accusations by the Justice Department. In caustic, often emotional terms, Mr. Sessions argued his case like a defense lawyer making a final plea to save his reputation. He denounced former Attorney General William P. Barr and the Justice Department's internal ethics office, saying, "It is they who should hang their heads in shame."

In 1960, Floyd Patterson brought his heavyweight championship back to P.S. 614, the Manhattan school for troubled boys from which he had been graduated. He was 25 years old and his message was simple: If I can get to the very top of the world, you can at least aspire to become somebody in a corner of it. In that seemingly simpler time, the message was received seriously: Patterson, who had just regained his title from Ingemar Johansson, had often visited the school; boxing was accepted as an appropriate way out of poverty for minority males, and the mystique of the heavyweight championship conferred a dignified celebrity on all the spiritual sons of Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano.

The Nets players sometimes jokingly call Derrick Coleman, of all things, Joe Jackson. Joe Jackson? Coleman says it comes courtesy of forward Rafael Addison. If you remember, Joe Jackson, father of the singing Jackson family, has been portrayed by members of his clan as a bossy, sometimes heavy-handed man. Clearly, Coleman didn't earn the nickname because he can moonwalk and sing at the same time. "It's just something Raf started," Coleman said of the nickname. "He took me home one time after a game. My cousin was visiting me, and I walked in the house and I started yelling at him, 'Yo man, I thought I told you to do this and do that.' My cousin said, 'Uh, oh, Joe Jackson is home.'

Five months after Serbian officials agreed to shut down a network of detention camps established during the Balkan war, American intelligence has reported that as many as 135 such camps may remain, some in Serbia itself. American officials estimate that in these camps and in those run by Muslims and Croats, as many as 70,000 prisoners overall may held. That figure is many times higher than international observers had officially counted.