Word: despairs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What Sheriff had at home was a comfortable life, an actress wife he adored and a passionate thing on the side with vodka and Scotch. Then his wife suddenly dies, and in despair he buries with her the manuscript and all the computer discs of his novel. Soon after, he is drafted by Great Uncle to produce a novel--in just 31 days--that will be published in the West under the dictator's name, all to dramatize the suffering of his nation under Western-imposed sanctions. Driven half-mad by the assignment, which he knows is the ultimate command...
...heart and mind or of one whose feelings are too intense for satisfactory verbal or conventionally melodic articulation. He can?t tell it to you. He can?t even sing it to you. He has to cry out to you, or shout to you, in tones eloquent of despair - or exaltation. The voice alone, with little assistance from the text or the notated music, conveys the message...
...happened-as Hollywood would have seen fit to script it-the only people aside from Reagan who really believed in Star Wars were the military leadership of the Soviet Union. The Zap! Pow! Bam! comic-book defense strategy reinforced Moscow's growing despair about the future and hastened the end of the cold war. And that, finally, is what has proved most galling to the Gipper's ideological opponents: his glossy Hollywood optimism proved more supple than the professional pessimism of the intellectual left. Ultimately, Reagan's sloppy and often insensitive domestic governance will have little impact on his place...
...similar to the words of a younger, hipper cultural critic: comedian Chris Rock. In Rock's "Niggas vs. Black people" routine from his breakthrough 1996 "Bring the Pain" tour, Rock contrasted the values of middle class blacks with lower-income blacks who had succumbed to a kind of gangsta despair. Among Rock's observations: some blacks liked watching movies in cinemas, other liked shooting them up; some blacks tried to be responsible, others thought if they merely took care of their babies they were doing something special. "There's like a civil war going on with black people," Rock announced...
...Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America by Tom Stanton details Aaron's trials on the road to 715, while The Ticket Out by Michael Sokolove shows that slugger Darryl Strawberry wasn't the only member of his high school team to fall victim to drugs and despair...