Word: hellishness
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...Brandon was well on his way to joining the two-thirds of black males in Baltimore who don't graduate from high school - and perhaps the nearly 50% who end up in jail or on probation - when almost miraculously he was lifted out of that hellish environment and settled into a boarding school in rural Kenya. There, he and other Baltimore boys who had been forced to grow up too hard and fast got a second chance to experience childhood - to climb trees, collect insects, do their homework together, read mystery novels. After attending seventh and eighth grades in Kenya...
...flooding and swept downstream. Mark Twain's characters claimed that a man who drank the water could grow corn in his stomach. You know all this, and yet you are unprepared for the Delta, otherworldly and flat, the best place to grow cotton on this earth, once a hellish jungle, cleared by the backbreaking labor of slaves and sharecroppers. It's a wet western Kansas, a beautiful, flat, fertile window...
...careful neutrality of Ondaatje's language sets the tone for what follows: not a political tract or an exercise in finger pointing but an exquisitely imagined journey through the hellish consequences of impassioned intentions...
...nine hours since dinner. At this point General Wong seems like a culinary genius. A zombie-walk in flip-flops to Store 24 for a snack that will undoubtedly hit the spot suddenly comes to an devastating halt. After the hellish three-minute hike, it becomes clear that this mission will be fruitless: the windows are dark and a sign reads, "Be back at 3:30." Knocking on the door, repeatedly, does nothing. Knocking turns into banging, yelling and screaming. After half an hour, it is time to surrender and weep at the failure to acquire foodstuffs. Then the feeling...
...WHEN THE TEARS CAME] Tells of hellish childhood...