Word: dismally
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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More than any other place in the nation, Washington yearned for spring. It was partly because Washingtonians, like people everywhere, looked toward the uplift in human spirit that the season normally brings. It was partly because Washington, like many another section of the U.S., had gone through a dismal winter, strangled by heavy snows, pelted by freezing rains, chilblained and miserable. But what set Washington apart in its eagerness for spring was the Administration's expectation of economic upturn that would bring the U.S. out of a recession that would be forever associated with bleak Winter...
What lends the book its interest, despite shortcomings, is a scattering of mixed-blood, split-level aristocrats, culturally nouveau riche but genealogically ancien régime, and some well-described scenes of a dismal garrison town with bored military wives and senior officers well past their World War I prime. Above all, there is the unusual setting. Despite the fact that Novelist Dohrman, 29, has spent only one week in Haiti, he manages to convey that the jungle to him is partly D. H. Lawrence's "blood-consciousness" and partly O'Neill's "dat ole davil...
...important executive luncheon, at which the management intends to separate the sheep from the goats, and he concludes that his career has gone from baa to worse. At home he tries manfully not to blubber ("They don't want me any more"), and his wife takes dismal, comical inventory of the monthly payments they must meet. "Well, there's the new hot-water heater . . . the garbage-disposal unit, the washer and dryer, the TV and the hifi, the new divan and those silly chairs that match, the gas range, the Deepfreeze, the power mower, the electric barbecue...
...often that the author of an autobiography consents to an introduction n which he is compared to a subhuman being. Such is the case of Wolfgang Leonlard, an ex-Stalinist official of East Germany, whose dismal career has apparently foundered on the dismal hope that "national Communism" would be better than the all-too-togetherness of a universal Moscow state. Soviet Expert Edward Crankshaw met Leonhard in Yugoslavia, where, says Crankshaw in his foreword, "he was rather like one of those legendary young men who . . . emerge from the jungle emitting strange sounds, having spent their childhood or adolescence...
Philadelphia's Negro population numbers about 490,000, with new immigrants -mostly from the South and 60% unskilled workers-coming in at the rate of 600 a month. Most of the Negroes are concentrated in the central sector of the city, dubbed "the jungle." There, dismal lines of grimy, red brick row houses huddle bleakly behind paneless or paper-covered windows, and tenants must sometimes use ladders in place of stairways, outhouses instead of running-water toilets. With the jungle overcrowded, other immigrants fan out into other areas in the city. Some well-off families manage to slip into...