Word: sordid
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Sadly, such actions seem a distant possibility. The American surrender only caps what has become one of the most sordid tales in recent history. With the polarizing effect of the Cold War diminished and the world's strongest military alliance standing right next door, the Western powers had all the right conditions to make a stand for international civility when the carnage began in Yugoslavia. Instead, they have allowed crimes unseen in Europe since the Nazis...
...playwright. His latest play, Dancing at Lughnasa, presents as different a perspective on the world from that of his first play, Faith Healer, as The Tempest does from Hamlet. The themes--of the ambiguity, uncertainty and misunderstanding that wrack our lives--endure. But in Dancing at Lughnasa, through the sordid banality and chaos, Friel strikes an indulgent, optimistic note...
Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould painstakingly critiques this sordid history in his oft-praised book "The Mismeasure of Man." As Gould notes, American scientist H. H. Goddard wrote in 1919 that superior intelligence ensures social dominance: "Democracy is a method for arriving at a truly benevolent aristocracy." While America has changed significantly through the century, Murray's argument is eerily reminiscent of earlier dubious claims...
These bizarre juxtapositions, commingling the solemn and the sordid, helped forge the legend of Big Brother as newspaper columnist. In the words of a 1933 ad slogan, WINCHELL HE SEES ALL HE KNOWS ALL. With its rightful emphasis on the power-mad side of Winchell's persona, Gabler's biography validates Burt Lancaster's chilling portrayal of gossipmonger J.J. Hunsecker in the 1957 film The Sweet Smell of Success. (In real life, Winchell, in cinema noir fashion, had his daughter Walda carted off to an asylum in a straitjacket in paternal rage against an unsuitable marriage.). The same haunting sense...
...Sullivans are a different kind of Massachusetts political family. There's no family money, no Hyannis estate, no hard drinkers, no Harvard degrees and no long, sordid history of scandal...