Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...weeks the whole world is young and strong and fearless, sporting and peaceful and clean. That is the Olympic myth and the wellspring of the Games' enduring appeal. They are like a national patriotic day for the whole world, a day when flags wave and people march and the grim realities of the past and, often, the present, are forgotten in a global surge of pride and unity. The reality has often been less inspiring -- in Hitler's Berlin in 1936, in the Munich beset by Palestinian terrorists in 1972, in the tit-for-tat cold war boycotts...
...grim image ought not to fade. As he arrived in Norway, luger Igor Boras confronted video of the assault on a marketplace in his hometown: 69 people died and more than 200 were injured in that worst attack yet on civilians in Sarajevo. A decade ago in that beautiful pastel city, everyone in the world was young and strong and fearless, sporting and peaceful and clean. Back then, so long ago, the harshest stories being told were of how much one had to pay for a beer...
Americans' impatience for quick-fix remedies resembles the frustration that drives inner-city youths to seize on illegal get-rich schemes: they want to cut corners, produce high yields and not pay a price. But grim experience indicates that, as with crime, hard time doesn't always pay the anticipated dividends. When money is poured into building another prison cell at the expense of rebuilding a prisoner's self-image, it is often just a prelude to more -- and worse -- crime. "They start as drug offenders, they eventually become property-crime offenders, and then they commit crimes against people," ( says...
...Roth's as well -- takes the reader through a pretty grim, no-frills narrative. The order is relentlessly chronological. Ira, devastated by the loss of his East Side haunts and friends and upset by the anti-Semitic taunts he hears in heterogeneous Harlem, ages predictably year by year. He adores his mother and fears his irritable father. He changes schools. He develops a nascent interest in girls and feels ashamed of himself for doing so. The outbreak of World War I is noted on the first page; the armistice is mentioned on page 153. Transitions are utilitarian in the extreme...
Robert DeFeo is grim faced. The L.A. city fire department battalion chief would like to be saving lives, but instead is filling and refilling the coroner's station wagon on perpetual duty in the driveway of Northridge Meadows. DeFeo's crew is using buzz saws and jackhammers and Swiss search dogs, and so far he has turned up nine corpses, each crushed while in bed. The coroner's car leaves but always returns. The heroics occurred earlier, when residents pried neighbors from tight spaces or let them down from the roof with knotted fire hoses. The place is crawling with...