Word: piteously
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Anyone composing a personal ad faces an inherent credibility problem. While we are accustomed to the self-promotions of politicians, say, we sense something bizarre when ordinary people erupt in small rhapsodies of self- celebration that are occasioned by loneliness and longing. One is haunted by almost piteous cries that come with post-office-box number attached: "Is there anyone out there? Anyone out there...
Little of the information about these literary celebrities will be new to students of Victorian letters. But Rose's anecdotes and insights provide a fresh view of the circumstances that bedeviled relations between the sexes a century ago. Take the piteous marital saga of John Ruskin, the most famous art critic of the age. On his wedding night, the 29-year-old Ruskin was paralyzed with disgust when confronted with the first naked female body he had ever seen. Promising to consummate the marriage six years hence, Ruskin told his bride Effie Gray that childbirth would ruin her beauty...
...bumbling posse that sets out to find a feuding quartet -Coulter, his buddy Mike Arizo, a cuckolded husband and his companion -trapped in the snowbound Rockies. Friend and foe are united, bind each other's wounds, curse as would-be rescuers pass over and around, unaware of their piteous fires and cries. After 41 days in the mountains, only Coulter survives. He becomes an instant hero, on 60 Minutes, in LIFE and in the town. Gradually, the ole mountain boys begin to suspect what the reader already knows: the angry husband and his companion have been shot by Coulter...
...hinges on the rising in Mayo, and there, in the euphoria of the French landing, the cause catches fire. In centuries hence, the Irish will sing of the glorious Men of the West and the humiliation of the British at Castlebar. This is all history, and so is the piteous climax, as Lord Cornwallis sweeps in with his troops against the rebels, determined not to endure another Yorktown. In his prodigious first novel, Thomas Flanagan grants this historic episode a new and panoramic life...
...across the Brooklyn Bridge to the World Trade Center, where Richard Pryor reigns as the Wiz. But before Dorothy gets there, she meets a roarious but cowardly lion (Ted Ross) and a marvelous scarecrow (Michael Jackson), hung up on his pole and tormented by rascally birds. Jackson sings a piteous lament, to the effect that "you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game." Wiz Composer Charlie Smalls is a gifted comic writer, and soon Nipsey Russell, whose rusty tin man is easily the best characterization...