Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Life is grim on Amami Oshima, an island in the typhoon-swept East China Sea, 200 miles southwest of Japan. The islanders are beset by leprosy, poverty, poisonous snakes, and fire. Again and again, storm-spread fires have all but wiped out the wooden shanties of Nase, the island's largest town (pop. 43,000). This month such a fire razed one of Nase's poorest sections-and blazed up into an ideological battle between a Communist and a Christian...
Miler Delany was the only competitor left to satisfy the record-hungry crowd. And this time he tried. He settled into his snug, easygoing stride and watched Maryland's Burr Grim sprint ahead of him into a swift first quarter. Clearly, Grim was going to try to pace him past Gunnar Nielsen's indoor mark of 4:03.6. And Ron was willing. But he thought Grim was starting just a little too fast and he hung back, well off the pace. When Grim faded, Ron got up on his toes and ran for the record...
...another grim chapter in one of the more shocking tales of modern education-the continuing story of a great city apparently unable to cope with the teen-aged hoodlums who terrorize its streets and public schools...
Bells of Defiance. Triggering the last brutal round was a crudely mimeographed manifesto calling for a general strike. The strike showed sinews of strength from the start. The morning before the deadline, grocery stores were crowded by foresighted housewives laying in supplies; knots of grim-faced workers idled on street corners. Half an hour before strike time, steel shutters slammed down on store fronts, and the usual bumper-to-bumper downtown traffic dwindled away to eerie emptiness. Then, from steeple after steeple, bells clanged out the Roman Catholic Church's defiance of the dictator and the signal...
...unfolding this grim tale, Novelist Bankowsky is thoroughly convincing as he enters successively the minds of a tormented religious fanatic, a furtive, greedy storekeeper, a mentally retarded girl. In each character's rambling recall, his own weaknesses are laid bare and another's motivation is made clearer. But it is the figure of Stanislaw that holds the book together, and in him Bankowsky has created a near-tragic embodiment of guilt. The flaws in this novel-occasional sentimentalism, and a needlessly interjected chapter set a generation in the future-do not detract from its great, raw impact...