Word: despairing
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...time when many parents despair of their children's learning much of anything in public schools, or even being safe there, the strict moral and religious values, discipline and order that typify Catholic schools seem to have wide appeal. So do the enhanced prospects for students. Nationwide, 83% of the graduates of Catholic high schools go on to two- or four-year colleges, compared with 52% for public school grads. "There's no question that at almost every level, students in parochial schools perform better than those in public schools," says Emily Feistritzer of the National Center for Educational Information...
...task remaining to him during his life by going back to Paris in order to paint the soiled walls and loosely-fixed posters he found on the back streets." Saeki today is a culture hero in Japan, a Van Gogh-like figure who killed himself in a fit of despair over his art at the age of 30 in 1928 -- a strange freak of reputation for a painter whose work seems not much more than sensitive pastiche of those two archbores of the Ecole de Paris, Maurice de Vlaminck and Maurice Utrillo...
Though Screenwriters Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue try hard to play fair, For Keeps? still trumpets a tattered teen-movie message that only the young think clearly and feel deeply. Darcy's mom (Miriam Flynn) does get to display some wistful despair -- "Sooner or later, everybody leaves," she says, referring to family and pals as well as lovers, "that's what love's all about" -- but in general she is a snooty shrew. Director John G. Avildsen (Joe, Rocky, Neighbors) relies mostly on his young star to bring passion and balance to the piece. And Ringwald, in a hospital scene...
Ackroyd sometimes overstates his satire of scholarship and art -- Chatterton's death by poison comes not out of despair but in the hope of finding a cure for the clap. Yet the poet himself is a poignant re-creation, and the supporting cast of irrepressible eccentrics might have tumbled from a chapter of Pickwick Papers. On a train, Wychwood literally devours a novel, rolling the pages into balls and popping them into his mouth...
...Primo Levi leaped into the stairwell outside the fourth- floor Turin apartment where his family had lived for three generations. There was little question that he killed himself intentionally. Renzo Levi said that his 67-year-old father had been depressed; friends spoke of Levi's dark moods. Yet despair was not what the outside world detected last year after Philip Roth climbed those stairs to interview Levi in his study. "He seemed to me," wrote the American novelist, "inwardly animated more in the manner of some little quicksilver woodland creature empowered by the forest's most astute intelligence...