But even in these wretched circumstances, Mr. Zahn conveys Ray's essential sweetness.
The only heroes are the people who perform small, noble acts in the midst of wretched circumstances.
As I recalled those patients and the wretched circumstances of their deaths, I began to tremble with regret.
Some women and men, particularly young men, are exploited for sex, forced into it by their poverty, wretched circumstances and manipulation by powerful abusers.
India is a nation where 300 million people like the Ratres are so poor they cannot afford enough to eat, yet even those in the most wretched circumstances struggle to survive.
A Dance to the Music of Time: Sequence of novels in which the hard-working Kenneth Widmerpool is done down by a motley assortment of charlatans and aesthetes, and dies in wretched circumstances.
"But even if you return to that old search and rescue system, that still doesn't provide you with a solution, a European solution, to a very real problem - which is thousands of people in wretched circumstances travelling huge distances, exiting ports in North Africa in the hands of illegal human smugglers and traffickers and perishing on the high seas in the Mediterranean".
Louis Herns Marcelin, a Haitian-born anthropology professor at the University of Miami, said that Haiti had become "an apartheid country": those with influence and money have greater fears about the change that outsiders might bring, while most people just want to see their own, often wretched circumstances change.
What these two very different writers have in common, apart from Hall of Fame-bad movies, are: Catholic upbringing; the death of their mothers under wretched circumstances; alcoholism (and, in Eszterhas's case, enough cocaine to powder the Alps); terrible encounters with death and disease.
Nobody ever wants to shoot someone; if they're normal, it's a wretched, heartbreaking circumstance.
