Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...commission insisted that houses maintain a consistent setback, and limited the heights of buildings. That sounds ordinary enough. But the solid even-block front is an honestly urban form, as well as a visually harmonious one. And these block fronts didn't become bleak. This is partly because of the plantings. But also, the buildings these Victorians built bulge with eclectic detail that interrupts the facade-plane. Oriel and bay windows bend out to gather light...
Novels about nuns, even if the holy ladies drive Jeeps and play baseball, have a hard time making it. When the nuns are members of a contemplative order, the outlook is bleak indeed. Yet this chronicle of 15 years in an English monastery is an immensely readable book, partly because the way of life detailed here proves as exotic and medieval as Cosa Nostra society, partly because the story moves briskly forward, with only a few lapses into melodrama...
...ballot counters-some 120 of them, mostly elderly ladies, half of whom are Democats and half Republicans (in order to keep the non-partisan election nonpartisan). In between counting ballots, some just sit quietly and munch the free coffee and doughnuts or stare at the bleak walls of the auditorium, but most gossip-about their children, their illnesses, the weather and, this year, the demonstrations at M.I.T. (which they didn't seem to like...
Gradual withdrawal would occur against Asian perspectives that are by no means all bleak or pointing inevitably to Communism. Much of the rationale for making the stand in Viet Nam was to curb Communist Chinese expansion. Partly because of U.S. resistance, that expansion has been halted. China's influence on the rest of Asia has been decidedly weakened, though this is largely because of the disastrous internal paroxysms of the Cultural Revolution. Devout Communist that he is, North Korea's Kim II Sung takes no orders from China while he is perfectly willing to accept its material aid. There...
...LONG-WINDED LADY by Maeve Brennan. 238 pages. Morrow. $6. Collected from The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section, these bleak reportorial vignettes of life in Manhattan create the impression of a raw private perception struggling against total loneliness: the great city observed...