Word: bitterness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...weather might go a long way toward explaining the relatively low attendance, but neither the bitter cold nor the freezing rain could dampen the spirits of a very vocal and supportive crowd...
...said his faith in science is tempered by the bitter realities of the AIDS epidemic...
Jamaica Kincaid is a writer of stinging force, rare intelligence and, alas, a single, anguished theme: her bitter resentment of her mother--who, as the author herself seems to realize, was merely a limited, self-absorbed woman. But in book after book (notably a brilliant, tormented novel, The Autobiography of My Mother), Kincaid displays the wounds of her unhappy childhood as a poor, bookish black girl in Antigua. Her new volume, an irritating navel contemplation titled My Brother (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 198 pages; $19), repeats the pattern of familiar, well-written complaint. (Opinions differ; in what appears...
...real subject is Kincaid's scalded psyche: how she felt about Devon's life (contemptuous at its waste--he was a charming, irresponsible, sexually profligate layabout); about his death (torn but loyal--she bought AZT in the U.S., and the drug gave him a remission); and about Antigua (bitter). The underlying, overflowing theme, as always, is anger...
...hates to see the work as a whole adopt the values of its own object of scorn. Simply in retitling the work The Heiress, the Goetzes define Catherine's character through her financial prospects. Nor do we delight in witnessing Catherine exchange her youthful naivete for such a bitter, scaly adulthood. This sour apple doesn't fall far from Dr. Sloper's withered tree...