Word: tragic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...here is the terrible plight of the Burmese people. In one sense, they are right. In a clever sequence, we are watching the annual military parade when the frame freezes and then quickly rewinds through recent Burmese history. First, it is comic - the regime's troops, marching backward - then tragic. We glimpse survivors of Cyclone Nargis, dazed and clad in rags; refugees fleeing the smoldering remains of houses laid waste by Burmese troops; blood-drenched protesters on the streets back in 1988, when the last democracy uprising was snuffed out and thousands were killed. Twenty years of suffering is compressed...
...award at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam in November and was screened at last month's Sundance Festival. It closes with a raid by secret police on DVB's Rangoon secret headquarters - also a reconstruction, although the events it depicts are real and tragic enough. Three reporters were arrested, others went into hiding. Joshua is now in exile, but the authorities know his name - they tortured it out of a friend - and keep his family under surveillance...
None of this is good or bad; it just is. The books of the future may not meet all the conventional criteria for literary value that we have today, or any of them. But if that sounds alarming or tragic, go back and sample the righteous zeal with which people despised novels when they first arose. They thought novels were vulgar and immoral. And in a way they were, and that was what was great about them: they shocked and seduced people into new ways of thinking. These books will too. Somewhere out there is the self-publishing world...
...Ever-Subtler Second. From the depiction of high drama as his father taught it, Wyeth has narrowed down to the moments when life is charged with change, swapping N.C.'s clash of cut lasses for his own clap of distant thunder. Sometimes it is only the tragic twinkle of quaker ladies, blossoming while he watches and fading in the frosty dew of early spring. Disciplining the romantic inside him, he has sought the ever-subtler second when existence is galvanized by the unexpected...
...influential godfathers in Congress - but it never completed those levees around New Orleans. Now the stimulus could include forward-looking efforts to help rebuild the city's natural and man-made defenses - or more-of-the-same projects that would increase the risk of another expensive as well as tragic catastrophe. It will depend on who is calling the shots...