Word: sad
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...important" plays about political issues or world-famous physicists or 19th century Russian philosophers. Ayckbourn's realm is smaller and more familiar - the domestic and romantic predicaments of modern, middle-class Brits. Yet no one has probed more acutely, or with a finer balance of laughter and pain, the sad human drama behind these tidy surfaces: the inability of people to connect, to see the casual cruelty they inflict on others, to come to terms with their failed illusions, to be happy. A woman's spoofy fantasies of a perfect domestic life turn into the chilling symptoms of her descent...
...products made before Aug. 6. Since then, Parents have been lining up at shops around the country to return the company's products. "The serious safety accident of the Sanlu formula milk powder for infants has caused severe harm to many sickened babies and their families. We feel really sad about this," Sanlu vice president Zhang Zhenling told reporters on Sept. 15. He bowed in apology, but offered no explanation as to why the company waited until September to launch a recall when parents began raising questions about Sanlu's milk powder in March...
...portrait of vagabond right wing radio host John Ziegler that penetrates the sad fluorescent-lit subculture of talk radio and expresses true disdain for some of Ziegler's politics. Yet Wallace is filled with admiration for the skills - "skills so specialized that many of them don't have names" - that make Ziegler good at his job. In one typically electric paragraph, he challenges the reader to appreciate some of these skills...
...have been replaced by sponsor names, such as the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) is being decimated by a videotape so entertaining that people watch it on a loop, mesmerized until they die of dehydration or starvation or lack of sleep. Reading it, you realize how soul-sad lonely you are. And Wallace creates that effect, like Pynchon, while being laugh-out-loud funny...
...hard thing to admit to being bored by Marilynne Robinson. She's a tremendous power in American fiction. She's the author of Housekeeping, a transcendently weird, overpoweringly sad book that was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1982, and Gilead, which won it in 2005, almost a quarter-century later. When Robinson writes--as she does in her new novel, Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 325 pages)--that the white hair of a sleeping old man is "like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming," her similes are so precise and so beautiful...