Word: bleakness
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Erks' territory is also a modern land scape of bleak mining towns, rundown homesteads and rural junkyards. Keeble resonantly plays the present against the past, especially in descriptions of Erks' dangerous drive over the mountains and across deserts. There are intensely perceived set pieces: a dog battling a possum; a woman reassembling a carburetor with Zen-like grace; a Snopesian funeral in a field littered with rusty tractor parts and dominated by the sight and smell of a huge pig roasting on a spit...
...diplomats, however, also admit that there is little if any likelihood that sanctions would lead to freedom for the hostages. Meeting with 80 Congressmen at the White House last week, President Carter painted a bleak picture of prospects for their speedy release. The main problem, he said, was that "there's nobody there with whom we can get in touch." He questioned Khomeini's ability to control the "international terrorists or the kidnapers who are holding our hostages." Echoing that view, one senior State Department official told reporters that "these terrorists are swimming in a sea of support...
...birders," as the devotees call themselves, asking them to call him collect with news of rare species in their regions ("Ask for Birdman"). He hired planes and boats and bushwacked through the woods of northern Minnesota. He flew to Alaska four times and spent 14 days on Attu, a bleak island in the Aleutians, where he saw the green sandpiper. On July 27 he surpassed the previous one-year record by spotting bird No. 658, an American woodcock, near a ditch in Chicago. In early December he flew to Texas in successful pursuit of the white-collared seedeater. That brought...
...have followed the single thread of nuclear weapons and attached some other strands to that thread to suggest a bleak view of the 70s. This would be a one-sided picture for me personally, since I can think of more than one issue at a time. The 70s have also seen what I regard as the mot significant cultural development of the decade: namely, the women's movements in all their variety and, at times, short-sighted over-confidence leading to backlash. The women's movements have affected not only the upper educated strata, but have filtered into the rest...
...advanced handsomely enough, but the psychology of the decade seemed to follow a downward trajectory. A consensus was lost, and authority seemed to operate only erratically. The nation split into single-interest power factions. The screws of the American machine jarred loose; the whole thing rattled. Yet any such bleak view of the decade is not entirely justified. Norman Mailer has observed that Americans are obsessed by the question of whether they behave virtuously or not; the ambiguities of the '70s may disturb their moral self-image, and with it, their yearning for clear-cut conclusions. In fact...