Word: somberly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bitterly, onetime Vichy Minister Pierre Pucheu had cried, "La comédie est finie!" when an Algiers military court condemned him to death for treason (TIME, March 20). Last week a higher tribunal denied him a new trial. No final clemency came from the somber Chief of State, General Charles de Gaulle, himself under sentence of death by the Vichy Government Pierre Pucheu had served...
...Saffady is a broad-shouldered, slim-hipped Detroiter with the somber, brooding eyes of a musician and the calloused but sensitive hands of a good mechanic. In the last five years, his mechanic's hands have tinkered out 75 inventions such...
Around 1870 there appeared at the Brazilian port of Baía a "somber anchorite with hair down to his shoulders, a long tangled beard, an emaciated face, and a piercing eye." He was clad in a blue canvas garment and carried a pilgrim's staff. He was young Antonio Conselheiro. For ten years he had been wandering in the backlands of Brazil (hiding there in shame after his wife had run off with a policeman), eating little or nothing, indifferent to danger, speaking in cryptic, prophetic monosyllables, sleeping in the open, and becoming a terrifying, unforgettable legend...
Redoubtable Rubbish. But Canudos was a trap. "Canudos invited attacks . . but when the invaders, drunken with a feeling of victory, began separating and scattering out down the winding lanes, it then had a means of defense that was at once amazing and tremendously effective. In the somber story of cities taken by storm, this humble village must stand out as an extraordinary and a tragic instance. Intact, it was very weak indeed; reduced to a rubbish heap, it was redoubtable...
Brazil's classic is more grim than the roughest U.S. realistic novel, with only Moby Dick, which it somewhat resembles in diffuseness and prose, matching its somber vision of life...