Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Viking; $3.75), is a witty farce with only a semblance of plot: Mrs. Vizard opens hostilities against Mrs. Bannerman because the latter serves Brown Betty for dessert. The scene is Serenity House, a resort version of Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, whose guest list makes the crowd at Bleak House look like a convention of bond salesmen. There are, among others, the social arbiter Mrs. Cortelyou ("When above 79th Street, do as they do above 79th Street"); the warring psychiatrists Dr. Onan L. Digges ("the Saniflush of the Unconscious") and the "Freudy-cat" Dr. Selig J. Reichner; Miss La Fosse...
...physical harm." Empty Streets. Churches are still full, for Poles are highly religious, and the vast quantity of vodka they consume is hardly sufficient solace for a life that is endlessly drab. Industrial production is up, and food supplies are adequate, but Warsaw, like most Polish cities, is bleak and shabby; at night the ill-lit streets are empty but for a scattering of street cleaners, drunks and rattletrap taxis...
Despite all these bleak points, there is little destitution. When their unemployment benefits lapse, the jobless are being kept afloat by savings, city welfare benefits, church charities, veterans' pensions, railroad retirement checks and social security. Queried by TIME correspondents, employment experts around the country last week were virtually unanimous in predicting that unemployment will get worse before it gets better. Even if a boom comes soon, says the Labor Department, unemployment will roll along a high plateau...
Those who feared the worst about January unemployment figures can take bleak satisfaction in being right. The most disturbing thing about these figures--besides the scary fact that their total (5,385,000) is the greatest for any January since the Depression--is that workers are now exhausting their unemployment benefits. Half a million have already received their last check. Before the half-year is out, 1,500,000 will be without benefits, and the prospects for a quick upturn in the economy are practically nil. In his State of the Union message, President Kennedy admitted that the slump...
...there is a fairly vivid equivalent of the horrors of hell in the threatened nuclear extinction of the human race. The Future of Mankind is a stern call to seriousness. It is also a call to reason, courage and responsibility. It is based on a premise that may sound bleak, but has probably been the rock of man's endurance through the ages: "No situation is absolutely hopeless...