Sentence examples for dire account from inspiring English sources

The non-fiction list features three books by New Yorker staff writers: Lawrence Wright's Scientology investigation Going Clear; George Packer's dire account of contemporary America, The Unwinding; and Jill Lepore's biography of Benjamin Franklin's sister, Jane Franklin, The Book of Ages.

Others worried that the incredibly dire account would be so overwhelming as to cause paralysis at precisely the time we need action.

In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood's dire account of a near-future United States called Gilead, an authoritarian government rises to power and quickly decides to drain women's bank accounts, the first step in a series of shockingly quick policy moves that seem to strip women of their status as equal citizens before they even had a chance to fight back.

Similar dire accounts came from Australian athletes and officials, fresh from a 20-hour flight.

They told Baker that based on what Reagan's own aides had told them about his mental state, if their dire accounts proved true, it might be in the interests of the country to have the Vice-President take over.

We get a sympathetic view of Roosevelt at Yalta, still holding some of his powers of alertness, against dire accounts of other attendees like Churchill's "lugubrious and indiscreet" confidant-doctor, Lord Moran.

Most of all, the humble suit of underwear highlights the Civil War soldier himself: his endurance and fortitude, his ability to make do with whatever conditions and supplies came along and his sense of humor, which pervades even the most dire accounts of battle and camp life.

In any event, absurd historical comparisons and name-calling aside, if this is the most dire accounting Toobin can muster of the costs of Snowden's actions, color me thoroughly underwhelmed.

Of course it is a national scandal that the Bush administration's disaster-management team failed so thoroughly in its response to Hurricane Katrina despite dire eyewitness accounts of the destruction's magnitude.

Some 20th century historians had begun to question the scale of the epidemic, partly because relatively few plague pit burials have been found, but Lewis's research bears out the most dire medieval accounts: overall her analysis across East Anglia illustrates an average decline of 44.7% in 90% of the settlements excavated.

This definition fails to take into account the dire economic need, the childhood sexual abuse, the brutal coercion employed by pimps, and the vast power differences of sex and race that drive the commercial sex industry.