Word: mercilessly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...After merciless stripping-away, the people who were once easily identified as rebels or imperialists are lost. Jimmy Ahmed, the ostensible leader of the black guerrillas, has the mongrel hue of Oriental-black parentage, and his thoughts are a hopeless Freudian melange of perverse lusts and aristocratic tendencies. The revolutionary persona is one that whites fear and Jimmy clings to; "He is carrying the burden of all the suffering people in the world," he writes of himself. But Jimmy's true concerns are homosexual encounters with poor boys, miscegenation and sodomy with upper-class women, and a book...
...capture of Madrid by Franco's forces in early 1939. More than 500,000 Spaniards had been killed in the fighting; nearly 100,000 more were victims of wartime terror and firing squads. There were to be other victims. Franco's victorious forces took a bloody and merciless revenge on their political enemies. Between 1939 and 1942, nearly 2 million people were imprisoned by the Franco regime for supporting the Loyalists, and perhaps 200,000 of them were executed...
Arlen seizes upon the collective memory of his people and enlivens it with merciless self-examination. His account of genocide has none of Hannah Ahrendt's lofty mandarinism. With tenebrous force he comes to realize that evil's best accomplice is guilt; if the victim can be made to feel culpable, any crime is possible. Like millions of other historical mourners of every persuasion, Arlen once preferred to ignore his roots, at exorbitant cost. For silence can be a plague, and the most chilling question in the book remains the one that Hitler asked two generations...
...everyone agrees. Toyokichi Endo, a Tokyo elementary schoolteacher who is a leading critic of the juku, calls them "unhealthy and unnatural" institutions that turn children into "monsters capable of coping with entrance tests but little else." Others worry about the gakureki system that has spawned the juku. The merciless competition for places in top schools has been deplored by, among others, Sony Corp. President Akio Morita, author of a 1966 book on "the importance of disregarding gakureki...
...evidently, the price one pays for an Allen comedy. It is worth the fee. For unlike his closest cinematic competitor, Mel Brooks, Allen aims his custard pies up, not down. If his humor is merciless, it is not unkind; Boris' angry monologues with God are closer to Fiddler on the Roof than to comic on the make. The same affection courses through his parodies of Fellini and Bergman and of Pierre at Borodino. In mocking classics, in touching on the topics of religion and mortality, Allen has drawn laughter where there was silence and mustaches where there were faces...