Word: despairful
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...given weekday night at the reserve desk of Lamont Library assembles an impatient crowd of hungry Gov 30 students. They wait and quietly fight growing despair as the last copy of James Q. Wilson's "Political Organizations" disappears from the shelf...
Unfortunately, Seaver is given to almost tearful assertions of the author's worth. During their collaboration, in a moment of Beckett's despair for the fate of his efforts, Seaver blurts, "But Mr. Beckett. You're crazy! Don't you realize who you are? Why...you're a thousand times more important than...Albert Camus, for example!" We can chalk this up to youthful enthusiasm, but upon mature consideration Seaver begins his quasihagiographical introduction: "Samuel Beckett is, in my opinion, one of the two or three most important writers of the twentieth century." Isn't there enough of this...
...among blacks (12.7%) is dreadful. It slows overall black progress and contributes to the decay of the cities. As long as modern society encourages so many women to want to work, more jobs must be created for them as well as for teen-agers -the alternative being a nagging despair and disillusionment with the capitalist system. These are social problems not solvable by overall economic policy, but requiring specific, targeted programs...
...South Africa," Pogrund says, "the White Afrikaaner Nationalist regime and the black nationalist movement. Everyone else is in the middle--the Coloureds, the Indians, the anti-apartheid whites--and they have to run to one camp or the other and hope they get protection. South African liberals are in despair--there is no place for them any more...
Such lapses are comparatively minor in an ambitious, magisterial and ultimately positive book. For Johnson demonstrates that Christianity, though it certainly caused enough bloodletting, did help tame the human beast, did offer hope in a landscape of despair. "Without these restraints, bereft of these encouragements," he concludes, "how much more horrific the history of these last 2,000 years must have been!" Given Johnson's grim recital of human frailty, that may seem more like faith than history. But, as he disturbingly observes, the first glimpses of a deChristianized secular future are most dismal indeed...