Word: underclass
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...Iran, the population is culturally homogeneous, and shares more closely its own brand of Islamic religion. Moreover, the royal family is closely allied with the religious leaders and popular as well with the rest of the people. Nor is the kingdom beset by a teeming urban center with an underclass ripe for revolt. Observes one U.S. expert: "You really don't have the same economic strains in the modernization process. The government has kept inflation to around 8% a year, and there simply isn't any unemployment." Even so, it is not all that certain that the tradition...
Much of Forsaking All Others will be read with a measure of disbelief. On the other hand, the public has been so saturated with the pornography of violence and infernal visions of the underclass that there may be little disbelief left. Breslin plays to this possibility with a stylistic naturalism that renders his characters as bundles of nerve endings and flurries of reflexes. They eventually numb moral response. When, for example, a man is dis membered with a chain saw, it does not seem to be an illustration of bestiality but a demonstration of the state...
...those Americans not yet successful (the struggling, the underclass) are apt to aim at ease, not excellence: the confusion contaminates character and disables ambition...
Luckily, crime and the underclass are not the only element in The Dean's December. Bellow may not have achieved the great foray into the alien waters he had hoped for, but he remains brilliantly entertaining on his home turf. In particular, his characters are dazzling. Valeria Raresh, Corde's mother-in-law, for whom the Corders have traveled to Rumania (Bellow, incidentally, also went to Bucharest several years ago with his mathematician wife on a similar journey) lies in a state hospital, her face criss-crossed with tapes and tubes. After a coronary and a stroke, it is only...
...clock news. They are faces too tough to be scared and too unsure to be anything else. They hold mocking, omniscient mouths and a tough-guy stare that could burn a hole in an adult's best intentions. They are the faces of the young urban underclass...