Word: bleakness
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...Robert Campeau, the American dream that seemed so alluring from north of the border has turned into a nightmare. A relentless overachiever, Campeau once noted how, as a boy in the bleak mining town of Sudbury, Ont., "I thought any house with indoor plumbing was a palace, and I hated the people who lived there." At 14 he became a machinist's apprentice, using the baptismal certificate of a dead older brother to pass for 16. "You have to push yourself to the front of the line," Campeau later noted. He built his first house after World...
Bruce Springsteen: The River (Columbia, 1980). Born in the U.S.A. was the record that made the Boss a legend, but the bleak majesty of this two-LP set shows the bedrock of his talent...
...sugary beaches, plush with unlikely flowers, inspiring rummy tropical dreams, have become the American paradise. Even the license plates say so. Two months ago, when Hurricane Hugo mowed across the islands from Guadeloupe to Puerto Rico, it turned a landscape that was achingly lovely into one that was painfully bleak. In the case of St. Croix, where a large bomb could scarcely have done more damage, the looting and disorder that followed were as terrifying as the wicked winds. And now, as the high season approaches, those who love the islands and hope to return are left wondering: How much...
...grim central image of modern spy literature is the death of Alec Leamas, shot by G.D.R. Grenzpolizisten at the Wall in the last scene of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. John le Carre's bleak and entirely believable novel was published in 1963, only two years after the East German regime built the Wall. Since then, Le Carre's surviving operatives and those of Len Deighton, another notable English spymaster, have made dodgy livings evading Vopos at the Wall, armed with little but false passports and the turned-up collars of their raincoats...
Members of the cast and crew have unflinchingly remained true to the bleak realities of Fugard's vision, even down to the use of words in African dialect. Boesman and Lena are portrayed at a moment of severe crisis and, admirably, the performance does not shrink away from the appropriate intensity. The audience is rightly exhausted by the play's conclusion and deeply touched as well...