Word: monstrous
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...corpses. Kim and his father, Kim Il Sung, are responsible for the deaths of millions of North Koreans, he estimates, including as many as 1 million political prisoners and 3 million in a 1990s famine driven by Kim's failed policies, which Becker calls "an unparalleled and monstrous crime...
...When it comes to monstrous crimes, the author knows his subject. His 1996 book Hungry Ghosts is the definitive account of China's 1958-62 famine, which killed some 30 million. For that work, Becker traveled through the heart of China, talking with peasants who recalled Mao's disastrous social engineering project, the Great Leap Forward. His research exposed a calamity that had been largely hidden from the world...
Rarely, if ever, has a Government program grown so large only to face extinction in so short a time. Created in 1980, the Synthetic Fuels Corporation had a monstrous initial budget of $15 billion. At the time, some experts expected the price of imported oil to reach $60 per bbl. by the end of the decade. The only solution seemed to be a drive to convert coal reserves, like those underlying the Great Plains site, to synthetic gas or oil. The SFC's first grandiose goal called for the U.S. to produce the equivalent of 2 million bbl. of crude...
...however, is not that the decision seems so baffling but that it seems so explainable. Most Americans are convinced that their nation is among history's most moral. Yet a combination of factors, most of them justified and all of them understandable, created a momentum for unleashing a truly monstrous force. Will future historians someday find themselves sorting through the rubble of another atomic attack, by a nation as moral or one that is less so, and come to the same frightening conclusion? It would be far more comforting to think that the dropping of the Bomb made global...
Honor thy father and thy mother is a sound precept in life, but dubious advice for a writer. From James Joyce to Tennessee Williams, from Virginia Woolf to Mary Gordon, modern literature has thrived on an undercurrent of patricide and matricide. Monstrous parents, it seems, are what gifted children barely survive in order to write about them with inspired resentment. Loving memoirs tend to rank second only to corporate histories of tool-and-die companies as the kind of book any reader can put down. In the face of this, Wilfrid Sheed, a witty, acerbic critic and novelist (Office Politics...