Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Report from the Front. In 1943, Dr. John Lucian Savage, top U.S. Bureau of Reclamation civil engineer, who had gone to Chungking at Chinese invitation to study potential hydropower sites, asked to visit the Yangtze gorge. The bleak area was a fighting zone, but the Chinese Army guaranteed Savage safe conduct. In quiet broken by occasional rifle shots from the sleeping front, Savage charted possible dam sites except those above Ichang at the mouth of the gorge, which was in Jap hands...
...fellow alumni, Arthur Koestler has succeeded in transforming his private horrors into brilliant pictures of contemporary life, his screams into some of the best of contemporary writing. His brush with death in Spain and France, plus his disillusioning lessons as a revolutionary, gave him the material for such bleak disquisitions as Dialogue with Death, Scum of the Earth, Arrival and Departure, and also for one of the finest novels of the past decade, Darkness at Noon (TIME...
...Nothing I write," says Author Wheaton in this light, gay record of her year-long (1935) honeymoon in the bleak Aleutians, "can possibly . . . show [me] to be a woman of strength and initiative." As wife of the local prekaska (storekeeper), and the only white woman on Atka, Helen regarded her Aleut neighbors with amazement streaked with alarm. The black haired, giggling, almond-eyed Aleuts, smelling strongly and permanently of fish, regarded Helen in turn with open admiration...
Sakhalin Island, half Russian and half Japanese, is poised like a blockbuster at the head of the Japanese archipelago. Last week the bleak, sparsely peopled island was the subject of a sudden blaze of Soviet publicity. Without exception, every Moscow morning newspaper published a two-column letter from the workers of Russian Sakhalin, thanking Premier Joseph Stalin for their liberation from the "horrors" of Japanese occupation 20 years ago. They promised: "We shall not relax our efforts one minute ... to bolster our defenses." The letter was also read in full by the Moscow radio...
...through the cruel bureaucratic mazes of getting a blood test, a license, a waiver of the 72 hours' invalidity. They tear in just under the wire for a grimy little civil ceremony that is shattered to bits by the passage of elevated trains. There follows a beautiful, bleak scene in an off-hours lunchroom where a munching stranger at the next table looks on and listens in as they droop over their inedible food, trying to fight off their bewilderment, their disappointment, their misery, their freezing shyness...