Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Ferdinand Marcos was elected the sixth President of the Philippines ten years ago, his island nation was in political turmoil. Even his opponents concede that Marcos, 58, has revived the Philippine economy and brought the country safely through a period of "anarchy, public confusion, terror and despair. "But the price has been high. Three years ago, Marcos imposed martial law and made himself a virtual dictator. Today an estimated 6,000 political prisoners are still in jail, including former Liberal Party Secretary-General Benigno Aquino Jr., 43, who might have defeated Marcos if elections had been held...
...industrialized nations and the poverty, misery and despair that blankets half the world's inhabitants. An estimated 1 billion of them suffer in some degree from malnutrition; perhaps half a million die of starvation annually. Lacking sanitary water as well as insecticides and disinfectants, tens of millions are struck down with debilitating disease-malaria, typhoid, hookworm, dysentery, cholera...
...OBJECTIVE STATEMENT Mitchell makes most prominent is suburban dreariness. Several songs are explicit narratives of that dish-water despair, there's-no-olive-in-my-martini madness. In "Harry's House/Centerpiece" Mitchell interposes a jazzy arrangement of a 1950s love tune, "Baby, you're my centerpiece," with a desolate vision...
Most of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, however, is not so clearly defined. Joni Mitchell's despair and cynicism about surburbia, her alluding images, are too easily missed--the words trip over each other and get lost. She rarely succeeds at complementing lyrics with music. The bouncy conga rhythms are often too swift a vehicle for the words; and the synthesizer-chorale approach she takes to the more philosophical poems only makes them pretentious or droning...
...marriage is subject to constant strain. John Adams feels bound to comply with the orders of the new government, even though it means putting thousands of miles between him and his beloved Abigail. She complains he doesn't write enough, presses him to return and often seems close to despair. Months pass before letters cross the Atlantic: some are lost and some are destroyed. And there is her husband's constant fear that one will fall into the hands of the British and be used as propaganda, which leads him to caution her to censor what she writes. Yet throughout...