Word: bleakness
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Irony serves to sharpen, and humor leaven, the mishaps that befall the book's eccentric families. Unrelentingly bleak, however, are the descriptions of cruelty to children, which are a hallmark of Gallant's stories in Home Truths. Indeed, with a mother like the matriarch in Saturday, there is no need to blame family tensions on Canada's ethnic problems. "She told each of her five daughters as they grew up that they were conceived in horror; that she could have left them in their hospital cots and not looked back, so sickened was she by their limp spines...
...sight of the lush German countryside on his flight to Bergen-Belsen, Reagan said, reminded him that prisoners at the camp must have despaired of ever seeing spring again. Choking with emotion, he went on: "All these children of God, under bleak and lifeless mounds, the plainness of which does not even hint at the unspeakable acts that created them. Here they lie, never to hope, never to pray, never to live, never to heal, never to laugh, never...
...UNDERSCORE the urgency of the currer situation, much of Freedom Rising presents the bleak side of South Africa. It is the story of the hundreds in South Africa who are going to jail, and of the sophisticated police state that puts them there. Swanson's personal abhorrence of apartheid permeates every page of the book; in fact, the tone is often unnecessarily moralistic since his facts speak clearly enough in opposition to the current regime...
Albania, an isolated, mountainous country of 2.9 million people, is a place of bleak statistics. It is Europe's poorest nation, and one of the world's most closed societies. Its harsh internal policies place it among the last bastions of Stalinism. This is the legacy of Enver Hoxha (pronounced Hod-ja), Albania's leader since 1944, who died last week from heart disease at 76. For more than 40 years Hoxha kept his tiny country on what he considered the only true path to Communism: self-reliance, total party control and a suspicion of outsiders that...
...Ansar camp was built by the Israeli army in 1982 on a bleak, boulder- strewn plateau in southern Lebanon to hold Palestinians taken prisoner during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The detention center was emptied in 1983 after Israeli, Syrian and Palestinian groups arranged a prisoner exchange, but it filled up again over the past 16 months as the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon waged their own war against the occupying forces. Israeli authorities explained that although the freed prisoners were members of various terrorist organizations fighting the Israeli army, none was known to have actively participated in attacks...