Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...child, Richard ("Angel") Williams found life in Philadelphia a bleak affair. Angel's father deserted his family when the boy was a baby. His mother developed tuberculosis. The boy was shipped from one institution to another, and after stealing a car, ended up in the reformatory. When Angel was turned loose last year, at 17, he energetically set out to make a name for himself...
...there any foundation for belief in the spontaneous combustion of chronic alcoholics?" a correspondent asked the British Medical Journal. No, said the editor, Charles Dickens' case (Mr. Krook in Bleak House) notwithstanding. "There is no scientific foundation for the theory that hell fire is anticipated ... in chronic alcoholics...
Marching north over the bleak, desolate, road to Munsan that night, in the true spirit of independence, but with no designs of conquest, was the widow Ahn Nam-chang and her little family. It was the first full moon of the lunar new year and, in accordance with age-old custom, peasant folk were cracking open the hard little Korean walnuts to foretell the future. No matter that Korea lay devastated by war, there was still a future. If the kernels came out whole, that was a good omen. On the other hand, if they came out broken, that...
...Along a bleak stretch of the southeastern shore of Alaska, the country is blanketed by parts of three glaciers. Heavy snows fall in winter; during the summer torrential rams pour down. In that spot last week, Phillips Petroleum Co. chose to go wildcatting for oil, the first major effort of a private company. Phillips' handsome chance-taking Chairman Kenneth Stanley ("Boots") Adams, 53, thinks it is a sporting proposition largely because signs of oil have been found there by seepages and in icebergs from the area. Under Adams Phillips has built a reputation in tne oil business...
...curtain call, Williams bows deeply to the book before him. But though the words he reads are Dickens', it is also Williams' skill as an editor and actor which makes Bleak House an unusual and fascinating performance...