Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cheyenne Autumn has everything it takes to make a great western epic, except greatness. In her book based on a bleak episode of American history, Mari Sandoz re-created the ordeal of 286 Cheyenne Indians, stung by the indignities of exile on a reservation, who in 1878 fought and starved and struggled through a 1,500-mile journey from Oklahoma's Indian Territory to their homeland in eastern Montana. En route, with U.S. Army units ever at their heels, they were bedeviled by bad weather, bitter dissension, and the white man's cruelty. In this wayward...
...first. "It is almost comically silly," Alsop wrote from Saigon last week, "to try to organize the kind of government in Viet Nam that will win the august approval of American editorial writers who know nothing of Asia and always seem to forget that the alternative is the bleak and ruthless tyranny of Asian Communism. There is no way out any longer, except to try to deal with the war crisis first, and to leave the political situation for later consideration. Dealing with the war crisis is the only way to create the essential conditions for comparative governmental stability...
...LITTLE LEARNING, by Evelyn Waugh. The first part of the British satirist's autobiography is a warm, impressionistic recollection of childhood, a spirited account of high living at Oxford and a miserable tour as a master in a bleak boys' school in Wales-in fact, almost all the ingredients of Waugh's brilliant first novel, Decline and Fall...
...literary riches. As to the riches, there is no doubt. White's six novels, from Happy Valley (1939) to Riders in the Chariot (TIME, Oct. 6, 1961), make up Australia's greatest fictional creation. Nor is there any doubt as to the embarrassment. White's bleak and austere vision is deeply antipathetic to the semiofficial Australian credo with its jovial good cobbery, manly democratic virtues and no-nonsense sex. White sees Australia, like his defeatist characters, as drifting toward a lost-generation doom of "impregnable negation, where there are no questions, only answers...
...wrote. "He could not be human and imperfect. The Mother alone was human, imperfect and could love. The Mother alone could represent whatever was not Unity; whatever was irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this was the whole human race." In contrast to the 12th century, the current times seemed increasingly bleak, and in The Education of Henry Adams, he argued that the dynamo had replaced the Virgin as an object of faith...