Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, VOL. VIII: NEVER DESPAIR...
...while it tells all, Gilbert's final volume tells it mainly from Churchill's viewpoint. Like the installments that preceded it, Never Despair gives little indication that, as his early critics noted, Churchill was often "a genius without judgment," a man with "a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain." As Manchester aptly observes, Churchill and his archenemy Hitler were alike in more ways than either would have cared to admit: both were brilliant orators capable of inspiring millions; both possessed wills of almost superhuman intensity; and both were meddlesome war leaders who constantly second-guessed their generals...
American society as a whole seems unable or unwilling to make hard decisions on pressing moral dilemmas. We live in a complex society and many controversial issues confront us every day. But instead of choosing to help in a real and meaningful way, we throw up our hands in despair and do nothing...
...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...