Word: bleakness
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...population of Luanda more than doubled to 1 million as tribesmen flooded the capital in search of work. In the squalid shantytowns of wooden clapboard, sheet metal and clay adobe that ring the capital, barefoot children share the streets with squealing piglets, chickens and goats. Conditions in the bleak ten-story apartment houses in town are not much better: in front of one building, women and children draw runoff water from an enormous pothole in the street...
According to the account of Secretary Shultz, Flight 007 first crossed the Kamchatka Peninsula, then the Sea of Okhotsk and the island of Sakhalin. Unless it changed course, the airliner apparently would have approached the area around Vladivostok on the Soviet mainland. This cold and bleak region is ordinarily off limits to foreigners...
...These bleak emotional landscapes will look familiar to readers of Dubus' three earlier collections of short fiction. Yet there is something new here: a religious sense, largely implicit in previous stories, that is now explicitly Roman Catholic. The narrator of A Father's Story, the last and best piece in this volume, is a devout believer whose wife has left and divorced him, making it impossible for him to marry again with the church's blessing. And he will not do so without it: "For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular...
...side effects of success. Many Japanese fear that they are beginning to suffer from what they call "advanced nations' disease," though the attack is not yet acute. In a recent poll, 89% of Japanese described themselves as happy with their lives. The present undoubtedly looks handsome compared with the bleak aftermath of the war. Many of the men who are now in the middle management of Mitsui and Mitsubishi were babies being fed a grain of rice at a time in 1946. Morita and Masaru Ibuka founded Sony that year by scrounging around the fire-bombed ruins of Tokyo...
...play from being all it could. Brenneman convincingly handles the most difficult role of Vinnie, alternating between the emotionally childish "daddy's little girl" and the cunning, evil woman who twists people to murder or suicide. But her snarling performance leaves the audience unable to pity her character. This bleak production denies Vinnie the final redemption earned by a tragic heroine. The other demanding role, Orin, occasionally eludes Keshishian, as he has trouble at first keeping the war-weary boy diffident and still remaining in character. Happily, the actor warms into his part. The rest of the cast perform competently...