Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Skeletons That Walk. At times he is in purgatory, at times in hell, everywhere creating fantastic visions compounded of memories of life, and odds and ends of curious reading. At one point, he is in an elaborate casino which illustrates the sordid side of man's instinct for gain; again, he and his fellow travelers find themselves in a terrifying place where there are only the skeletons of women, but walking skeletons who are taken sexually by visiting soldiers. The travelers visit many lands of the mind and spirit, but never do they find their souls...
...sordid development, Cabazon got more than its share of human tumbleweed, and with it on the hot desert winds came unbridled avarice and violence. The town is stonily accustomed to all sorts of trouble. In Cabazon last month, a Four-square Gospel preacher and a gun-toting bandit-who was shot to death by Los Angeles cops the next night-fought a grim, barefisted battle for the right to buy the festering town dump. In Cabazon last fortnight, two octogenarians battled over a woman...
...just to make sure, the Union's Minister of Justice sent around three armored cars. In Cape Town, an M.P. rose to warn the government of South Africa about the dangers of tolerating such "rabbit warrens" as Cato Manor, where "23,000 Africans live under the most sordid conditions...
...tooth for philosophic talk, but the meaning of her own existence seemed empty. Three relationships of the university years gradually opened Simone's eyes to herself. There was her cousin Jacques in whom she saw only a romantic image, although he actually carried on a series of sordid liaisons, finally married for money and died of alcoholism at 46. There was her friend Zaza who overtaxed herself trying to be Simone's fellow freedom fighter against parental cant; when she died of meningitis, "I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death." And then...
...virtually nothing to prevent it. In the U.S., prevention is left to law enforcement officers, and addicts go from court to jail. This is all wrong, says New York City's Chief Magistrate John M. Murtagh, 48, who from the bench has studied the sordid side of narcotics law enforcement and its failures for ten years. For addicts he urges medical treatment, both physical and psychiatric, as well as help in rehabilitating themselves, and long-term doctors' care. Only thus, he argues, can the illicit traffic in marijuana and narcotics, estimated at $400 million a year in underworld...