Word: pitilessly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gods continue to smile on Nicholas Gage, a writer who knows how to tell a good story and, even better, has a good story to tell. His 1983 memoir, Eleni, pulled the reader into the pitiless Greek civil war of the late 1940s, when Communists fought to destroy the royalist government. Gage told how the Reds came to his mountain village to round up children for indoctrination in Albania. His mother resisted and smuggled him and three of his sisters to safety. For her defiance, Eleni was tortured, shot, and her body thrown into a ravine...
...next play fared better: The Women, a pitiless satire featuring 35 characters, all of them women and most of them harpies, sniping, gossiping and philandering their way through the beauty salons and the drawing rooms of Park Avenue. A showcase for its author's diamond-sharp barbs and her wicked wit ("a frozen asset" is how a virgin describes herself in the play), it opened in December 1936, ran for more than 600 performances and was soon turned into a popular movie. Having proved herself on that front, Luce took off again, this time to tour the world and cover...
...glamorous. Certain television producers understand this instinctively, which is why Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas do not star in a show called Toronto Vice. Canada's rising cosmopolis may suggest a bright promise of public responsibility and efficiency, but it is Miami whose hard-edged pastels define the pitiless sensuality...
What fun A.N. Wilson has with these foolish mortals. Love Unknown is his tenth novel, and his command of caustic social comedy seems complete. He is pitiless in describing the cliches of adultery so eagerly embraced by his lovers -- Simon's nattering about whether his many "meaningless" affairs have rendered him unfit for nobler passion, Monica's inflating to Wagnerian grandeur her demand that he leave his wife. Meanwhile, domesticity grinds on relentlessly, and it is the urgent and unpredictable demands of his large, eccentric family that finally defeat Simon...
...Iran and the contras, all the distressing tendencies of the Administration have combined to produce the kind of blunders that resonate far more than an error in judgment, however serious. Errors in judgment can be, and in Reagan's case regularly have been, forgiven. But this disaster throws a pitiless light on the way the President does his job, confirming the worst fears of both his friends and his critics. Simultaneously stumbling into the Iran fiasco and allowing a bizarre scam to fund the contras to take place had an impact powerful enough to scar Teflon precisely because the events...