Word: squalidity
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...conditions under which farm laborers toil have improved somewhat since the squalid Depression era so well evoked by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle; yet field work remains one of the most unpleasant of human occupations. It demands long hours of back-breaking labor, often in choking dust amid insects and under a flaming sun. The harvesttime wage for grape pickers averages $1.65 an hour, plus a 250 bonus for each box picked, while the current federal minimum wage...
...Italy on a Fulbright in 1963, paints with tempera and oil on wood panels, as did Bellini and Giorgione, and loves Renaissance perspective. He limns tiny images of skinned-looking women or bloated, lecherous men as zestfully as Bosch him self, and sets them against the wall of a squalid Roman slum. Surrealistically oozing globules and pustules contrast with saints' pictures and comic-book illustrations. The result is an emphatically modern version of everyday hell, but it is more than merely nightmare for its own sake. The squalor usually serves to set off the loveliness of some ver dant...
...just. The Palestinians are among the bitterest people in the world, and with reason. In the wake of the 1948 war, they scattered throughout the Arab lands. Educated, intelligent, some of them staff the ranks of governments and the faculties of Arab universities. But the majority were herded into squalid camps, fed by the United Nations on 7¢ a day and used as pawns by Arab politicians ?particularly Nasser?to justify the continuing struggle with Israel. While diplomats spent over 20 years discussing and dropping various plans for resettling them, the Palestinian children were being taught as their primary...
Bogside, where 5,000 Catholics live, is a squalid slum of crumbling two-story buildings jammed into a valley that was once an enormous swamp. Its poverty-encrusted homes are forever damp, and a veil of smog coats the area. It is a place where the city's mostly Protestant police "do what they like," say sullen residents. This night they did, using batons and water cannons furiously in the narrow streets, as the Bogsiders fought back ferociously. Bricks ricocheted off buildings or disintegrated shop windows. Petrol bombs bounced and flared in the glass-shard-littered streets. One crowd...
...piazza, a sadly dated message could still be read: WE WILL CARRY EVER FORWARD THE FORCE, THE CIVILIZATION AND THE CULTURE OF ROME: BELIEVE, OBEY, FIGHT . . . DUCE, DUCE, DUCE. Yet modern history, Mussolini included, had passed Torregreca by. The imposing ducal palace was actually chopped up into "a squalid maze of schoolrooms and government offices, each with a stovepipe sticking drunkenly out of a window." Change was the shallowest of facades, mostly visible as ruin. A "cardboard democracy" allowed Communists and Christian Democrats to succeed one another monotonously in the mayor's office. But the real power still rested...