Word: bleak
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...alive, and Brady's blonde mistress, Esther Myra Hindley, 23, a wheyfaced, bouffant stenotypist. They were charged with slowly killing a ten-year-old girl and two boys, twelve and 17, by suffocation and ax blows, among other means. Two of the victims were buried naked in the bleak Manchester moors, where Myra posed smiling over the graves for Brady's camera; the third corpse was found by police in Brady's house. In addition to the bodies, photographs and tape recordings (found in a Manchester locker), police also discovered a lubricious library of sado masochistic pornography...
...whole truth can never be known, the partial observations that make up the commission's report are dreadful enough. In a 300-page book delivered last month, it offered the most exhaustive study of U.S. crime to be made in decades. It described a situation so bleak that it threatens the very foundation of the Great Society. It painted a picture so ominous that the implications have yet to be fully appreciated by legislator or layman. The overall crime rate has been spiraling dizzily year after year: it shot up 13% in 1964, 5% in 1965, another 11% last...
...ancient Latin word for mask) is too deliberately difficult to rank with Bergman's best. But in an era when the director who dares to repeat himself is rare indeed-when the cinematic world is full of one-shot wonders, Bergman's consistency is itself refreshing. His bleak, unsparing vision of the condition of man remains his private property. Persona is one more acre of that estate-often tilled, perhaps, but still worth the plowing...
...ruin in marriage, in business, and finally in life. In the end he commits suicide, having expended his gifts unwisely, particularly his second wife, a mentally unstable and drug-ridden singer. Though Kennedy's fate and Doremus' have far different origins, the twice-bereaved Barney finds a bleak common moral: "Every man, even the most blessed, needs a little more than average luck to survive this world...
...Pieces. A bleak story, surely, and an old one. But Helen Hudson, who cast a cold eye on college professors in an excellent first novel, Tell the Time to No One, has a pitiless yet imaginative gaze. To one of her subjects, Sunday in the city is "a great gap surrounded by walls, emptied of one week and not yet filled with the next." To another, "Christmas is a hateful time; the bunting was pretending to tie up a whole city into one cozy bundle. But the string was too slack. Odd pieces like Meyer kept falling...