Word: despairful
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...BOSS changes his approach to his urban themes of despair and limits on Nebraska. Where darkness and a desire to prove it all night have previously been prime concerns, there is now hopelessness and a desire to die. These songs are more directly personal, and the souls bared are badly damaged. Every one of the album's 10 cuts is chilling: two characters face electrocution for murders; there are two other shootings; another character seeks to elude a state trooper; four of his men are out of work. But the songs engross rather than repel because of their sincerity...
While Springsteen's sympathy for his victims does not aim to legitimize their actions, it effectively draws the connection between personal tragedies and larger social ills. The answers to these problems are not apparent and perhaps less so than they have been in less threatening times. But the despair which once prompted down trodden characters to "spit in the face of these badlands" and "take a knife and cut this pain from my heart" on previous albums now produces little of this feisty desire to combat debilitating odds. Pleads the jailed autoworker in "Johnny 99": "Then...
...together and drift apart, as they did in Alt: Fear Eats the Soul; a hard-won life could blow up in its heroine's face, as it did in The Marriage of Maria Braun; a cunning mind could schuss down the Alps of dementia, as it did in Despair; and Fassbinder would watch, and show. He was a camera-one that hummed relentlessly until the end. More than a dozen Fassbinder films still await U.S. release...
...tone is ominous, the guilt pervasive. Prayers are uttered under gray, indifferent skies. No one is quite certain where the atmosphere ends and the characters begin. The place is Greeneland, scene of some 40 books and movies. By now readers should be weary of its squalor and despair. Instead, each year brings more visitors. The reason is Graham Greene's ability to remain, at 78, one of the world's most unpredictable artists. From comedies like May We Borrow Your Husband? to the sheer lunacy of Travels with My Aunt, he has consistently astonished those who thought...
...gorilla mouthing the prayer for the dead over a human being? Malamud, who once called for fiction "filled with love, beauty and hope," has now written a novel filled with death, bestiality and despair. Why has he called it God's Grace?Even in fiction, his grace must mean more than man's disgrace. -By Patricia Blake