Word: despairful
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During the following two years the three siblings lived inside refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines. Although they were no longer terrorized, they continued to sleep in the dirt and catch colds while less hardy escapes succumbed to the squalor and despair. Some refugees gobbled down food with a hunger that caused shrunken stomachs to burst. Lien watched one man groan and writhe after eating several bowlfuls of rice; he died that evening in his sleep, by his wife's side. According to Lien, he had simply become "too hungry...
Victims of the default, who thought the bonds were a safe haven for their money, were feeling outrage and despair. Many elderly bondholders were depending on the securities for retirement income, but the bonds that had been bought as recently as March 1981 for $5,000 sold last week for as little as $700. Robert Kahn, 69, a former court reporter living in Hollywood, Fla., and his wife Selma, 67, had $10,000 invested in Whoops Nos. 4 and 5 bonds. Says he: "I felt secure. That was the whole point of buying the bonds. I didn't want...
Novelist Leslie Marmon Silko: $176,000 in 1981. Before receiving her award, Silko was an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona. "I was sliding into despair. I might have thrown in the towel," she says. "Teaching just didn't give me the time I need for writing." Silko, who is a Laguna Pueblo Indian, now lives with her two sons on a small ranch in the Tucson Mountains. She has finished a screenplay, intended for public television, that is based on an Indian fable about an encounter with evil. She also reports "good progress...
...apartments out in suburban regions that look like an interminable Bridgeport smudging into the outskirts of Albuquerque. Some 75% of the population lives in the narrow Pacific corridor from Tokyo to Hiroshima. Land prices are impossibly high (more than $100 per sq. ft. in suburban Tokyo). Newly married couples despair of ever owning a house (a typical two-room Tokyo apartment measuring 400 sq. ft. costs more than $83,000). The clutter of Japanese life is not only difficult, it is sometimes noxious. Lakes and swamps are polluted. For a people with an exquisite and even rhapsodic appreciation of nature...
...novel Revolving Door deals with protagonists whose ordinary lives cloak sadomasochistic and pathological behavior. The Cheeverish approach of Yuko Tsushima, 36 (A Bed of Grass), examines the roots of family distress and false nostalgia. Taeko Tomioka, 47, is a poet turned novelist, celebrated for her unflinching analyses of social despair. For these women, says Anthologist Yukiko Tanaka, "writing is the antithesis of the selfless submission prescribed by Japanese culture. Women writers have needed great courage to surmount the many obstacles to their attempts at such self-assertion...