Word: despairful
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Theroux has manufactured a masochistic journey. Instead of taking side trips in to the bush, he feels obliged to continue on the trains, treating us to flies, rats, humidity, diarrhea and other vacation treats. He is constantly near exhaustion and despair. Complaints color all his comments; he criticizes the books he reads; everyone bores him. Each new town is another burden and descriptions become indistinguishable--arriving hot and dirty at a collection of huts, he walks the streets, settles into a hotel, and disparages the food. Fun includes testing fellow passengers: "How many miles are there between stops?" Disgust overpowers...
...self-delusion to see the Palestinians as unreasonable terrorists and dismiss the issue. Conditions of hopelessness and despair encourage violent response, and the solution lies not in turning a cold shoulder but in soothing Palestinian ills. If they are to be made more reasonable and less violent, it must be by talking with them instead of closing our ears to what they are saying...
...objections that will provide alibis after the event. The few prepared to grapple with circumstances are usually undisturbed in the eye of a hurricane. All around them there is commotion; they themselves operate in solitude i a great stillness that yields, as the resolution nears to exhaustion, exhilaration or despair...
...guise of a realist with a somewhat spooky sense of humor. The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) appeared as slim companion pieces; they pivoted on the same philosophical question, i.e., how to impose values on a neutral universe; and both dwelt on despair as a source of grim comedy. But they were also set in a recognizable version of Maryland's Eastern Shore and populated with conventional characters. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) changed course. An encyclopedic parody of 18th century English picaresque fiction, the novel was also a comic meditation on early colonial...
Just as in the darkest days of 1932 when fate gave America its great leader F.D.R., we now have a second opportunity to elect the one man who can bring our country back from the depths of despair. It will be a tragedy if the Republicans fail to nominate-and the electorate fails to elect-John B. Connally as our next President...