Word: tormenting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...happened to Utopia? Those once myriad visions of ideal societies have all but disappeared, or have been transmogrified into the demonic dreams of science-fiction. Gone are the blessed isles, the jungle retreats, the mountain fastnesses, the subterranean wonderlands that promised a perfect life free of toil and torment. The urge to envision an earthly paradise seems to have spent itself...
CALIFORNIA. Though it leads all states in systematic penology, California has the nation's highest crime rate. Critics also claim that the system is characterized by a kind of penal paternalism that becomes psychological torment. In a much touted reform, California judges give indeterminate sentences; corrections officials then determine each offender's fate according to his presumably well-tested behavior. Thus 66% of all convicted offenders get probation, 6% work in 20-man forestry crews, and only 13.5% of felons go to prison. Despite rising crime, California's prison population (26,500) has actually dropped...
...span of suffering and the sense of damnation varies. For some, the searing pain, the numbing descent into nothingness lasts minutes or hours or days; for others, weeks, months and years. It is Samuel Beckett's special vision to see man's entire life as a torment, a flaying of the heart, a hell without...
...committing himself to a place in the narrative, intent only on mirroring the mind of the character at hand. This makes for some instances of stunning understatement, particularly in the last pages; a still-innocent Ernie Munger hitches a ride with two might-be lesbians who stridently torment each other and use the naive Munger as a pawn in their game, personifying on a car seat a world without charity...
...blind are known to develop extraordinary capacities in their other senses, so Russia has been similarly graced. Decade after decade, her greatest writers form an apostolic succession of the alerted conscience. They have burned with the flame of truth, justice and probity. No state-ordained trial or torment that may lie ahead for Alexander Solzhenitsyn will beat a lie out of him, for there are no lies in him. He is the conscience of Russia...