Mr. Dreyfus and Mr. Kelly believe that great books are the "gathering places" where the major forces of a culture are focused, and so they are able to chart our descent from Homer's gratitude before many gods to Wallace's paralysis before a plethora of choices.
The pictures chart the descent of Iraq from the initial post-invasion euphoria into the extreme violence of the battles for Karbala, Samarra, and Falluja.
The magnetic Mr. Stewart-Jones finds a genuine, hope-inspiring heroism in his character, offset by Mr. Zuaiter's Bisher, who convincingly charts a descent into hopelessness.
A theater review in Weekend on Friday about "Guantánamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom"' misidentified the actor who, the critic wrote, "convincingly charts a descent into hopelessness".
The next chapter in such tales often charts a descent into drugs or gangs, but Mr. Alessa, 20, and Carlos E. Almonte, 24, who both grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, apparently had other plans.
The beginning of the end is documented in Big Sur, charting his descent into alcoholism, and concludes with something of a whimper in 1966's Satori in Paris, in which an almost pitiable and lonely Kerouac heads to Brittany to search for his antecedents.
But Jez Bond's sparky production charts the descent into mayhem with engaging wit as the alarming extent of Natasha's rigid, theory-based parenting is exposed and as Izzy launches into a drunken, gloriously incoherent aria of self-pity about the multi-cultural conspiracy that has left decent, confused white folk afraid to open their mouths for fear of committing some hate crime.
Chapters on the western and eastern fronts chart the slow descent into mutual slaughter and operational stalemate.
I also not that the Newsnight twitter and FaceBook feeds chart its ongoing descent into irrelevance, while the BBC 'The Editors' blog celebrates a month without any BBC Editor having anything on their minds.
Our Cairo bureau chief, David Kirkpatrick, charts the dizzying descent of Egypt's first democratically elected president.
