Word: despairing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...below the poverty line, but the Underclass constitutes only about one-quarter of that figure. The number is imprecise because the term itself is vague. It refers to the poor who are more than just temporarily down and out, the ones caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and despair. For the most part they are black and live in the decayed hearts of major cities. But the Underclass is defined less by income than by behavior. Members are prisoners of a ghetto pathology, the denizens of a self- perpetuating culture marked by teenage pregnancy, fatherless households, chronic unemployment, crime...
...bridged? At times Terkel is overtaken by despair: "What had presumably been our God-anointed patch of green appears to be, for millions of us, a frozen tundra." Yet the author cannot maintain a long face. After repeatedly exposing the country's down side, he expresses his own second thoughts on the American Dream. He decides to roll the dice with America's eternal resource: the altruistic young. They "may reflect something . . . unfashionable for the moment and thus hidden away, something 'fearful': compassion. Or something even more to abjure: hope...
...admiration is for figures like Laurence Olivier, whom he glimpses backstage, sweating, swilling champagne, denying desperate illness -- and making up to go onstage once more and transform despair into dominance. His pity is for someone like Garbo, who has allowed herself to be victimized by her beauty's decay and so exiled from the consolation of creation. Describing a rehearsal of Der Rosenkavalier he once heard Herbert von Karajan conduct, Bergman writes, "We were drowned in a wave of devastating, repellent beauty." That is how one feels emerging from this book, which is surely one of the finest self-portraits...
...despair of the Committee to Conserve the Courts, her campaign ( group, the chief is a highly reluctant warrior. Relying on just a small group of volunteers, she has already sacked two top campaign strategists because "they wanted me to send direct mail that said nasty things," she explains. "I don't feel comfortable with the political process...
...even if they seek help, many addicts find that the waiting time for drug-treatment centers can be as long as ten months. Those alcoholics and drug users who successfully break their addiction all too often find that staying clean is impossible in an environment of despair. Without adequate housing and a chance for steady work, advocates for the homeless insist, the cycle of addiction and dependence will not be broken. "If I had my own way," says Cynthia Reynolds-Cain, who runs Detroit Health Care for the Homeless, "I would like to see those who want to be employed...