Word: despairing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...many novels that aim at the nerve ends of a whole nation, The Dark Wood is undeniably sincere in intention, but in the telling is pat and unconvincing. Author Weston has strong and respectful feelings for the abandoned soldier and the miserable widow-but her slick answer to their despair is to have them meet accidentally and fall in love, because the lonely soldier reminds the lonely widow of her dead lusband. Though The Dark Wood has its cold-blooded villain and villainess, most of the characters are treated as normal, unheroic people of the 20th Century -with the difference...
Like most New Yorker short story writers, Author Parsons knows how to reproduce scenes from middle-class American life with photographic neatness, and a restraint that verges on bloodlessness. Author Parsons' characters are often worn to the bone by despair and nostalgia, but they are rarely impolite; they give vent to long sighs, but never to bad language...
Ramendra Narayan Roy, Kumar (Prince) of Bhowal, was the despair of his tutors. When the Kumar was 25 he was-in the opinion of a learned judge reviewing his life years later-an "unlettered oaf who spent his days with stable boys and his nights with harlots...
...finally I came across three pages which lifted my feeling of despair. TIME'S Religion department assures me that there is still reason to hope. Methodist Pastor Safran has the courage to speak out against the . . . racial bigotry which we in the North practice. The Church of England actually has more applicants for religious training than it has vacancies. A fighting Protestant Irishman has gotten hard-bitten policemen to act like "gentlemen." Japanese Christians predict a tenfold increase in their ranks. And TIME says that "the greatest writing in human history has been religious writing. . . ." A wonderful department, indeed...
...never stopped singing. They had found songs to lead them, like defiant banners, into battle; they had sung on the way to concentration camps and gas chambers. By war's end, their chorus had thinned; the hungry have no songs and the dead no voices. But amid festering despair and slowly healing hope, many still sang-some to forget and some to remember, and some because they did not want to be alone with silence. Despite counterpoints of desperately wanted gaiety, what they sang in 1946 was mostly blues...