Word: bleakness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
NEWS COVERAGE of President Reagan's recent trip to South Korea showed the Chief Executive standing resolutely in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), gazing at the bleak North Korean horizon. Two major topics must have been discussed with South Korean officials during the trip--the Korean Air Lines 007 massacre and the recent murder, almost certainly by North Korean agents, of several high-ranking South Korean ministers and aides in Burms. And of course the overall themes must have been defense and trade. Why these topics have become increasingly important to America, and why the Korean dilemma cannot be solved with...
...sound, I think that it is time for change. At this time it is not at all clear that student opinion will eventually find a place in the almost sacred institutions that influence academic policies at Harvard. To put it quite bluntly, the prospects for change are bleak. How change is going to come about is another question altogether. It will not be easy and will require a good deal of experimentation of the trial and error kind before it can have a positive effect on the academic community. Yet a search must be mounted for a compromise between students...
Robison has been grouped with the bleak, minimalist school of New Yorker writers who have succeeded Updike, Cheever, and Salinger. Though Robison writes the occasional Salingeresque sentence ("One morning I was fixing cinammon toast of something and I had to practically he on the counter to keep from going into a complete faint") such puppyish exaggeration is rare. Like Ann Beattie and Frederick Barthelme, she casts a cold and detached eye on her characters, and tends to write spare prose about her spare people. People, what's more, who are distanced from their emotions. We see them the outside, largely...
...notes that output is "growing faster than even we expected." The rebound has rescued some 2 million Americans from unemployment and given millions more a new feeling of confidence. Families are buying more shirts and sofas, carpets and computers, autos and airline tickets now than they were in the bleak autumn of 1982. Factories are bustling again as companies hurriedly build up inventories to make sure they stay ahead of demand. The Federal Reserve Board reported last week that industrial production hit an all-time peak in October, up 14.8% from the recession's 1982 low point...
...Brook prefers to describe it as a search for the essence, a stripping away of conventional trappings. He has turned the apron of the stage at Manhattan's Vivian Beaumont Theater into a patch of dust beneath hot, glaring lights, and on it he has traced the bleak geometry of the characters' fates quite vividly...