Word: hopelessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...long this boom-and-bust cycle has been operating, no one really knows. Finding out might seem to be a hopeless task, considering that the phenomenon was discovered only about a century ago by Peruvian fishermen. (It was they who called it El Nino, the Spanish name for the Christ child whose December birthday marks its peak.) But last fall, Columbia University oceanographer Richard Fairbanks was floating in the equatorial Pacific gathering data that could tell researchers about El Ninos going back thousands of years. Working aboard the research vessel Moana Wave, Fairbanks spent weeks at El Nino's very...
...Robertson did what he could do, airing an interview with Tucker on "700 Club" Tuesday in which the born-again Christian said that God, not the legal system, was deciding her fate. Texas Governor George W. Bush declined to do all he could do, which was offer a hopeless 30-day stay of execution after the Supreme Court twice turned down her appeal. "God bless Karla Faye Tucker," Bush said at a press conference announcing his decision to abide by the finding of the courts, "and God bless her victims and their families...
Carswell's further discussion of the O.A. is quite to the point--he himself realizes its superiority to any E., however A. His illustration includes one of the key "Wake Up the Grader" phrases--"It is absurd." What force! What gall! What fun! "Ridiculous," "hopeless," "nonsense," on the one hand; "doubtless," "obvious," "unquestionable," on the other, will have the same effects. A hint of nostalgic, antiacademic languor at this stage as well may match the grader's own mood: "It seems more than obvious to one entangled in the petty quibbles of contemporary Medievalists--at times, indeed, approaching the ludcrous...
Billy Lynch, a lovely, funny man (a hopeless, lifelong drunk), is dead in middle age. His funeral is just over, and his friends and family have gathered at a quiet bar in the Bronx to forgive his ghost and congratulate his widow. So Alice McDermott sets down at the outset of Charming Billy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 280 pages; $22), a rueful shrug of a novel whose strong, shrewd opening pages should be taught in college writing classes...
...finally--in a tragic conclusion which recapitulates the movie's insistence on displaying powerful images of the horrors of the Holocaust--Max is forced to examine his convictions and his own identity. The film's evident main theme: the ability of the human spirit to escape even the most hopeless of prisons, so long as the individual understands and takes pride in itself...