Word: bleakness
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Europeans take a bleak new view of their chief ally
Towering, superbly equipped research institutes contrast with hospitals that are bleak, antiquated and poorly staffed. Some Soviet physicians are equal to the best in the West in such fields as orthopedics and ophthalmology; yet doctors still use such primitive therapies as mustard plasters and cupping and even leeches. Treatment is administered free and drugs are inexpensive, yet patients often must bribe doctors and nurses for medication, operations, even to have linen changed and bedpans emptied...
...anxiety to soften that bleak mes sage, Urban Cowboy tries to create a structure and an optimistic mood in a tale about people whose existences have nei ther structure nor much hope. What could have been a hard crust of contemporary life has become a soggy piece of chain-store white bread...
...more immediate and practical problem facing residents of the devastated black neighborhoods, which were bleak and run down even before the burning, was where to buy food, clothing and other daily necessities. Gangs of youths filling shopping carts with meats, canned foods, liquor and clothing had been commonplace. One black man had time to lash a dining-room set to his car roof-but was arrested when the engine would not start. There had long been a shortage of shops and services in the densely populated communities. Asked one young black: "Now where people gonna buy milk? Where they gonna...
...delves through Theo's journals and his own memories of their abutting lives, Narrator Stern etches a bleak chronicle of loneliness and lust, punctuated with quiet irony. Stern notes the perennial alibi of the spy: treachery is excusable because it is always performed in the name of humanity. The excuse is held up to the light and found "curiously selective, since few spies seem disposed to share their thefts with anybody but the Soviet Union...