Word: tragic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tribute to Brahms opened with his Tragic Overture in D minor, Op. 81. Though not one of Brahms' most widely played pieces, the overture is by no means dull, beginning with two dramatic chords and followed by the full statement of the main theme. The piece fluctuates between extremes in dynamics, tempo and mood, immediately placing it in the Romantic period...
...excesses of Mobutu's corruption might be comical were it not for the tragic consequences his despotism has wreaked upon his countrymen. While Mobutu lounged in his Belgian castle, a Peace Corps survey in 1980 revealed that in a nation that owns one-quarter of the world's diamonds, malnutrition was killing more than one-third of the Zairian population. The U.S. was a key player among the Western nations that helped line Mobutu's coffers. The current overtures of China to the Western marketplace confront the global community with a similar challenge. Let's hope that Washington does...
Testosterone is the young man's curse and the moviemaker's blessing. It imparts to the male teenager that preoccupying randiness that drives him to adventures and alliances he's going to regret someday--at best with wry embarrassment, at worst with a sense of loss verging on the tragic. Yet those rioting hormones also power tales of the young and restless that can sell profitably to the young and restless--in other words, date movies for the under...
...powerful mentor, John Ford, a director whose sentimental pictorialism masked a mean and primitive spirit. Wills devotes almost as much space to him as he does to Wayne, yet never notices that Ford romanticized not far-darting freedom but stolid dutifulness. He and Wayne gave it near tragic dimensions in the great They Were Expendable, a terrible obsessional quality in The Searchers. Twice (in Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) they endorsed the creation of elaborate lies in order to lend grandeur to this essentially selfless and military virtue...
...third-trimester exceptions permitted by the court for the "health of mother" are wide enough to allow a healthy teenager, eight months pregnant and carrying a healthy baby, to squeeze through the clinic door. Most times, the reasons for a late-term abortion are as tragic as those endured by the women Clinton introduced at his press conference when he vetoed the ban last spring. But, in addition to physical health, courts have allowed "emotional, psychological, familial" factors to be considered, as well as "the woman's age." We fool ourselves if we don't acknowledge that these exceptions have...