Word: squalidity
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...first major eruption of those long-simmering tensions came on a hot summer's day in 1959 in the squalid Wadi Salib area of Haifa, where 15,000 people, mostly Moroccans, were crammed into tenements. After a policeman wounded a Moroccan, crowds of Sephardim unleashed their pent-up anger. They pelted policemen with stones, wrecked some 25 local shops, burned two buildings and, in the process, sent a shudder through the nation...
November. In the author's satiric fantasy, the Black Sea peninsula has become an island off the Soviet mainland, something like capitalist Taiwan in relation to Communist China. In broad strokes Aksyonov contrasts the glittering hedonism of the islanders to the squalid austerity that prevails on the Soviet mainland. In Aksyonov's fancy, Crimea is the hog heaven of the conspicuous consumer. Dom Perignon flows like vodka in the luxury cafés and restaurants. Ferraris and Cadillacs jam the freevays on veekends. (In the original, Aksyonov used the English words transliterated into Russian.) Glass-and-steel houses...
...White House. Diminishing obsession with the Cold War permitted intellectuals to look critically, at their own country once again. The era's affluence spawned both social optimism and the revenues to pay for modest new welfare measures. The civil rights movement touched the nation's conscience and illuminated the squalid underside of American life...
...collection also includes two novellas that rank as classics, not only in Colette's canon, but in all of 20th century French literature. The Tender Shoot is the story of a singularly nasty middle-aged roue's pursuit of a 15-year-old peasant girl. Upon this squalid tale, Colette lavished her most lyrical language and poetic fancies, heightening the sense of evil...
Based on the obscure, reconstructed facts of her life, the movie documents Silkwood's story vividly, drawing in its wake a stunning depletion of the squalid life in her southern Oklahoma town, and graphic details of routine abuses at a nuclear power plant. It successfully avoids over-romanticizing Silkwood's role as a pseudo-reactionary, instead presenting the material without a slant while filling the plot with amazing detail and brittle, yet good natured humor...