Word: despairful
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Always at the street corner, always at our side, often at our mercy. The wild- eyed man blocks the subway-car aisle, slinging curses and entreaties. The gray madonna and her smudges of children hover outside the church, despair incarnate. The glib hustler in designer jeans glides down the movie line. The kids with the grimy windshield rags orbit the intersection. The old man with no eyes sits on the steam grates in winter in a wet cloud of pain. The obsequious panhandler waits outside the automated-teller machines, where wallets are full and walls are transparent. Somehow, always never...
...radical choice of his own. When the Dreck really closes in on him, abetted by the p.r. machinations of the Arch himself, Joe makes a brave, ambiguous move. Powers describes it in a terse diminuendo that may puzzle some readers, but its implications are moving nonetheless. Prompted by despair as well as hope, resignation as well as renewal, it can be seen as either a spiritual triumph or a practical failure: not for nothing does the novel end with the word cross...
...Despair no more, for we bring you good tidings of pure beef and high cholesterol. Chicago Frank's has arrived...
Hoffman gets the blend of hope and despair just right. She also conveys the social dimensions of childhood AIDS. The Farrells become pariahs: Amanda's friends and teammates shun her at their parents' insistence; her little brother Charlie gets cold-shouldered by his best friend; and her mother Polly gives up her free-lance photography business. On the up side, her father Ivan becomes friends with a terminally ill homosexual who is manning an AIDS hotline. Amanda's status as a potential gymnastic champion is more than a gimmick; it provides a standard by which her physical deterioration and emotional...
...unsuccessful writers the postal service mostly outputs despair: rejection slips and royalty statements showing negative balances. For literature's grandees it mainly offers worldly delights: invitations to accept honorary degrees, chair a grant-giving panel or cash a nice subsidiary-rights check. The more typical professional writer, however, earns neither pity nor envy -- just a modest living, neither more perilously nor more glamorously obtained than anyone else's. For him, the postman's bag is ever a hilariously mixed...