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.