Pius XII has been accused of being "the supreme bystander," Hilberg says, but should instead be seen as exemplifying the predicament confronted by everyone caught up indirectly in the Holocaust, beset by dangers and confusion, limited by faulty perceptions and "delineated by... nationality and temperament, much as all the inhabitants of Europe".
That is the unexpected predicament confronting Young, the kind of Indiana boy who grew up sleeping with a basketball.
But that is nothing next to the predicament confronting Terry Gilliam, who was less than halfway through directing his next film when Mr. Ledger, one of its stars, was found dead in a New York apartment on Tuesday.
That is the predicament now confronting the mortgage industry, where it has become clear that many billions of dollars in home loans were sold, guaranteed and rated as safe without anyone bothering to examine whether the loans were made with due regard for the rules.
We are awash in information about our current predicament and confronted constantly with the literature of speculative doom, but what might truly help us is literature documenting the social realities of living and writing in lean times.
The practical predicament we confront is that the combination of finance capital and public administration – the dominant drivers of employment and growth over the past 30 years – has not generated very much value.
The space is so cramped that Thomson, who is just over 6ft, will only be able to stand upright in the doorway, but he seems to derive a certain grim satisfaction from confronting his predicament.
A growing number of American workers are confronting a frustrating predicament on payday: to get their wages, they must first pay a fee.
America's current predicament -- it confronts the possibility of losing both Venezuelan and Iraqi oil at the same time -- is thus instructive on two counts.
