Word: starkly
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...Polish military is a rare institution in the Communist East bloc: a People's Army that is truly popular. The 319,500 members of the three major armed forces, the largest non-Soviet military group within the Warsaw Pact, have a tradition of austere professionalism, which stands in stark contrast to the corruption that has plagued Poland's civilian bureaucracy and angered the people. A recent national poll showed that civilians ranked the army third in favor among the country's institutions, just behind the Roman Catholic Church and Solidarity. (The party came in a poor sixth...
Pixote is one of the most powerful films ever made about poverty and oppression in Latin America. Its lack of overt moral commentary is more than compensated for by its stark, at times shocking, realism. Even the most graphic American films seem tame by comparison. Babenco uses scenes of crude abortion and vicious sodomy to capture the misery of an impoverished and overpopulated Third World metropolis. Filth, noise, chaos, this is Pixote's world: grim walls, dim light, inane pop music blaring in the background...
Sprawling across a dusty mesa outside Santa Fe, the stark gray pen-which guards and inmates alike call "the hell-house"-was the site of one of the country's worst prison riots. In February of last year convicts went berserk, killing 33 fellow prisoners, some with acetylene torches. Many of the victims were suspected of having broken the sacred code of cons everywhere: never snitch. Now trials are either over, under way, or imminent for 27 inmates charged with murder in the riot-and this, in turn, has inspired more bloodshed: Explains Joanne Brown, director of Adult Institutions...
...settlement which was not really a success." Reconstructing a gathering his family had held some 20 years earlier, he recalls a tableau: his father depressed, his mother on the verge of hysteria. Even the Francoeurs' idea of Catholicism cannot comfort: "It was a religion, not of recourse, but stark truth: death is what we live for, and as terrible as it is, to die is better than to live...
...this belief. One says: "We're all separated, we brothers, and hardly know what one another is doing, and yet that doesn't matter, because we know one another in a bigger way, which keeps us together. Isn't that so?" Daniel answers, "Yes." And this stark, moving novel echoes that affirmative. -By Paul Gray