Word: squalor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sicilian hills turned up none of the extravagance of Cosa Nostra's cinematic lore. No suitcases of cash, no jewels, nothing to match the popular imagination of the all-powerful godfather. Still, Italian police had no doubts that the square-jawed 73-year-old living in near squalor in an abandoned farmhouse had reigned over the very real-life affairs of Cosa Nostra's billion-dollar business of drug trafficking, high finance and cold-blooded murder. Provenzano, who had been sentenced to life in absentia for a series of high-profile murders, had opted for the spare existence in order...
...Wife. Walker had been all dewy moonlight as a soldier courting Garland the year before in The Clock, to which this film is an uneasy sequel, but now he learns the price of romantic impulse. The newlyweds, holed up in an improbably palatial Greenwich Village apartment (at MGM, even squalor was laid out on the grand scale), are so ill-matched, the happy ending is either a reversal or a strenuous act of Hollywood's wishful thinking. Presenting the hard facts of postwar accommodation, then glossing over them, was MGM's way of offering a panacea, or placebo, to millions...
...Parsi trader from Bombay, group founder Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata knew how to turn a profit. But J.N. also had a patrician vision of spreading wealth and lifting a nation. In a 1902 letter to his son about building a workers' city around his Tata Steel works, he deplored the squalor of industrial England and anticipated what would become a standard for urban planning: "Be sure to lay wide streets planted with shady trees, every other of a quick-growing variety. Be sure that there is plenty of space for lawns and gardens." After his death in 1904, the city took...
...loaded with all kinds of cultural assumptions, clash with the reality. Overstaying her travel visa she becomes a reverse illegal immigrant, working under the table at a language school. She stays for a time with her ex-pat quasi-boyfriend Harry, who aspires to literary greatness by living in squalor, in spite of being the scion of a wealthy family. Eventually Carla's idealism and Harry cynicism come to philosophical loggerheads as Carla accuses Harry of being a "colonialist" and Harry declares Carla a "tourist...
...corruption, reforming infrastructure, education and health care - will take generations to achieve. History suggests progress will be uneven and messy. During the Industrial Revolution in the British Isles, starvation and forced migration almost halved Ireland's population. In the late 19th century in the U.S., millions lived in squalor, and militias occasionally shot striking workers in labor disputes - it happened as late as 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia had one of the fastest rates of economic growth in Europe, even as peasants starved and an urban proletariat grew up ready to revolt. It's easy...