Word: sullenness
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...keep parroting, "No one in this country goes hungry." As bodies pile up in the streets, the bosses try to explain them away as caused by typhus and by neglecting "the elementary principles of hygiene." In the march-past of commissars, thieves, forced laborers, secret police, distraught mothers and sullen children there are few really absorbing villains, nor are there any heroes - or even very likable people. The book's impact, as well as its conviction, comes from the author's own involvement in the horrors of which he writes: it is a cry, not only from...
...longer they waited, the more sullen they grew, and the more receptive they became to the fanaticism of the Moslem Brotherhood and the rabblerousing of Communist agitators. Firebrands among them killed Jordan's King Abdullah (for compromising with Israel), overthrew governments and raided into Israel, setting off a chain of attacks and reprisals that led straight to the massacres at Kibya and Scorpion's Pass...
Some 15,000 homeless people struggled out of the muck to the barren hills beyond; 39 were known dead, 90 were reported missing, and many unrecorded migrants were lost. Downriver at Laredo, the sullen, muddy river crested at 62.2 ft., a good 10 ft. higher than the previous record and 20 ft. higher than the International Bridge, which was swept away...
Unable to command enthusiasm, the Communist compel obedience. The hapless Chinese cannot speak his resentment publicly or before his child, who has been taught to spy on him, or in front of a friend, who may be an informer. He can display his disapproval only by sullen compliance or by loafing on the job. The opposition is real but unorganized: a silent resistance that shows up not in guerrilla successes but in production failures...
Elsewhere in the valley the sickness takes stranger forms, intensified by the fact that the people of European stock have "become aware of the narrowness and danger of their circumstances: the threatening sea, the enclosing mountains, and behind them the sullen weight of an awaking continent." Storekeeper Fluit, for example, is "gravely ill" with the conviction that "man, nature and evil powers" are all plotting against him, and that to survive he must be "sullen, suspicious and constantly on guard." His friends and neighbors feel much the same way, but they have discovered that the best antidote to gnawing fear...