Word: pitilessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Simon Wiesenthal asked whether it would be proper for a Jew in a slave-labor camp to grant forgiveness to a dying SS man begging absolution for earlier murders. As part of a symposium that is incorporated into the book, the writer Cynthia Ozick said absolutely not: "Forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It blurs over suffering and death. It drowns the past. The face of forgiveness is mild, but how stony to the slaughtered...Let the SS man...go to hell." How-to books, therapy and interventions may be useful in dealing with an unfaithful spouse, gossiping colleague...
...freed from her parents' over-whelming influence) plays with the primitive imagery of the island. This section of the book almost resembles Apocalypse Now--it depicts a slow, insane voyage punctuated by the methodical expulsion of students around her, picked off one by one by the sniping, brutal and pitiless teachers. These teachers are every premed's nightmare--a series of Nurse Ratcheds bent on tormenting the weakest and the strongest alike. However, Jane slips through this carnage and, supposedly, beings to grow...
...search of food, tottering, often falling into the dust to die, sometimes within sight of their goal. This time it is not only emaciated mothers with their hollow-cheeked children but skeletal men as well, not just in the war-ravaged south but also in the north. Across the pitiless expanse of Sudan, starvation threatens 2.6 million people, of whom 350,000 may be facing death...
...still undersize and boyish, but he was just 13 when rebel Renamo soldiers crept into the hamlet of Taninga before dawn in 1988 to steal food and took him too. They threatened to execute him, armed him with an AK-47 assault rifle and turned him into a pitiless killing machine aimed at his family, friends and neighbors on the government side of Mozambique's civil war. "They told me I must fight in order to eat," he stutters, loath to recall those years. "I killed people. I saw their faces when I hurt them." He cannot look a questioner...
...heart of the play is the sparring between Wilde (Michael Emerson) and his courtroom antagonists. The flip, willfully perverse Wildean wit suffered the rude shock of having to defend itself under pitiless legal questioning. Asked if something he has written is true, Wilde replies, "I rarely think anything I write is true." He was a victim, of course, of Victorian prudery but also of the perennial clash between the aesthetic and the moral, the realm of art and the realm of life. Wilde realizes too late that it's an unfair fight. "One says things flippantly," he apologizes wanly...