Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...rendered this desolate tale more humane and, I think, more complete. Perhaps not the sort of rediscovered affection that caps off Portrait of a Marriage, but maybe a glimpse into the middle seventies when through, say, a feminist sharing group, Mrs. Elliot would have the chance to communicate her despair with other ex-wives in the same aimless, professionless bind. One hopes so, at least, because she can't sit and stare at the symbolic wallpaper forever...
...great enthusiasm and little discrimination. He approached his reading with the same naivete apparent in his writing, accepting the literature of decadence as a manual for living. His bible for many years was Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. That Crosby's life of debauchery and despair was inspired by books rather than authentic feelings is effete in itself. And many of the maxims he gleaned from Dorian Graywere really only rehashes of Huysmans's A Rebours, which in its turn is often nothing better than warmed-over Baudelaire...
Toiling in an arcane area that totally baffles most ordinary mortals, mathematicians usually despair of even trying to explain their work to laymen. Yet recently two University of Illinois mathematicians announced a breakthrough of such widespread interest that even the reticent American Mathematical Society issued a rare press release. The news: after more than a century of futile brain racking, one of mathematics' most famous teasers-the so-called four-color conjecture-has finally been proved...