Word: despairful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...permanent guide ropes help you up a litter-strewn Everest; and even space travel (if Sir Richard Branson's recently unveiled ambitions are anything to go by) will one day be within the financial grasp of the average tourist. But before you allow this to plunge you into existential despair, take note of a marvelous new book. The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel, out this month, is the guidebook publisher's attempt to make us see ordinary places in extraordinary ways, thereby revealing the new horizons that beckon right under our noses. "Experimental travel" is the clever invention...
...heavy argument indeed. But Robinson does not pursue it doggedly or even systematically (to have done so with such elusive material as music would have been painfully Procrustean). What he offers instead is an interesting potpourri of perceptions, suggestions and possibilities. He demonstrates, for example, the despair of the hero of Winterreise by noting that Schubert consistently describes reality in a minor key and changes into the major only when he is shifting into fantasy. This is a somewhat technical point, necessarily, for most writing about music is either technical or gush. In addition, Robinson has the wit to confess...
...very well." Auschwitz Survivor Rudolf Vrba manages a smile of roguish irony as he recalls the Germans' insistence that Jewish corpse carriers must always be "running . . . They are a sporty nation, you see." Itzhak Zuckermann, a member of the Jewish wartime resistance, has resources not of humor but of despair. "If you could lick my heart," he tells Lanzmann, "it would poison...
...stunned. In an astonishing turnaround, Yurchenko, in effect, redefected to Moscow, leaving behind a furor of questions, doubts and recriminations that promise to echo for months. Did Yurchenko simply have a change of heart, one brought about by the dark gremlins haunting a homesick mind, or by despair over being spurned by a Soviet girlfriend living in Canada? Or was he an ingenious fake, his flight to the U.S. and subsequent reversal shrewdly planned by the Soviets to humiliate the Reagan Administration and to glean secrets from debriefing sessions with the CIA? Either way, Yurchenko's flip-flop deeply embarrassed...
...months later the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. An angry Sunday-school teacher is dangerous. Carter thrashed about in his despair, pulling the U.S. out of the Moscow Olympics, embargoing the sale of American grain to the Soviets, and losing the nation's confidence in his Vienna nuclear arms deal. It died in Congress...