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The Vietnam War ended badly for the United States, and lingering public bitterness made life difficult for many veterans. American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen returned from Vietnam to a civilian public that regarded the war as a mistake and the results a failure. A popular image of the Vietnam War veteran arose of a deeply troubled and psychologically wounded man, condemned to recapitulate mentally and emotionally the anguish of fighting, killing, and dying. The culture of the post-Vietnam decades, glorifying the expression of emotion, deeply suspicious of public institutions, and, for much of the period, pessimistic, accounted for much of the ambivalence of the larger society toward veterans. Some veterans faced hardships, torments, and distress, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and a variety of diseases linked to Agent Orange, including cancer. Others found their wartime experiences rewarding, or at least not damaging, and they readjusted easily to civilian life.

This chapter discusses the Stoic conception of anger and the control of anger. It examines the Stoic view that anger is a dangerous emotion that can torment both its possessor and the human beings who are its object. In response to the excesses of anger, the Stoics proposed their own extreme measure: to do away with anger entirely. They proposed an apatheia—a freedom from passions in which there is no frenzy or rage, no annoyance or bitterness, no moral outrage. The recurrent question in ancient texts from Homer to Seneca is whether a warrior needs anger to go to battle or not. Seneca, like many moderns, says no, but then he proceeded to eliminate other, more constructive forms of anger that might be essential to good moral character in general.

This chapter focuses on the brain-drain problem in post-war Germany. While military research was banned altogether, its specialists were being ferried out to the victor nations irrespective of their political backgrounds. Those remaining behind regarded this exodus with bitterness as yet another form of reparations besides the confiscated patents and dismantled factories.

This chapter shows how Descartes depicts the feeling of thought reaching maturity in epistemological bitterness. Descartes’ Fourth Meditation, which grapples with the question of error and which some classify as Descartes’ theodicy, struggles with the elegy as the form its narrator seems to desire but cannot openly avow in confronting the limits of what thought can do. Instead, Descartes casts the problem of thought’s limits in the language of praeteritio: the complaint it wishes to make cannot be named, pursued, or cast as a loss worthy of grief except when framed as a thing that cannot be considered. Invoking the form of the elegy in these repeated negations, Descartes frames a coming-to-terms with limitations as a refusal of mourning and an embrace of a kind of casual, and surprisingly somewhat sweet, bitterness, made possible by the will. Central to this chapter’s claim is unpacking the ends of thought—and what it feels like not to be able to master knowledge with the only tool available to it.

Albert Bigelow Paine's fourth volume of Mark Twain: A Biography is more detailed than his other three because it records the few years of Clemens's life vividly. Paine is clear and equivocal in his treatment of Clemens's accelerating to varieties of determinism, and this determinism is the measure of Clemens's late-life unhappiness with himself and the world. Poor Clemens was constantly prey to emotional descents, even in the midst of the prophylactic pleasures with which he filled so much of his time. Though Paine claims that Clemens is resilient, Clemens life is still abound with anger, bitterness, and self-loathing.

Exploring the everyday encounters between Chinese managers and Ethiopian laborers on the construction site in Tigray, this chapter challenges depictions of Chinese engagement with Africa as a model imposed on a practice. Chinese workers’ initial expectations of life and work in Ethiopia stand in contrast to the difficulties they face on the ground. Puzzled by the apparent ingratitude of Ethiopians, their lack of cooperation, and, worse, their repeated attempts to sabotage the building work, Chinese road builders are left disenchanted. Firm hopes of helping Ethiopians develop are offset by the bitter taste they experience in the face of repeated pushbacks, not only on the building site but also in the courtroom. Unraveling the intricacies of Chinese-led development in Ethiopia, this chapter discusses internal divisions in the Chinese community, road builders’ vain efforts to fashion Ethiopian laborers, and Chinese narratives of bitterness that address their own perceived lack of agency.

Unmet expectations inspire narratives of bitterness among Chinese road builders. These tales of suffering, however, derive not only from the obstacles they face on the construction site, but also from their backgrounds as sons of peasants who are struggling to cast off their rural backgrounds – migrants who are forced to move overseas to climb up the social ladder in China, and men who seek to gain respectability as sons, husbands, and fathers. Their hopes of fashioning Ethiopian laborers are intricately linked to expectations regarding themselves. The bitterness reflected in their tales derives as much from their predicaments abroad as at home. Yet speaking their bitterness also has a positive twist and fulfills a crucial function. Juxtaposing conditions of victimhood with collective strength in enduring these conditions, the narratives offset self-pity by celebrating perseverance, lending workers the strength to carry on.

Machado follows the pendulum swinging between his authorial role as philosopher and analyst in the guise of his own Counselor Ayres and his function as a close participant in the customs and rituals of daily life in his city-universe. His lofty perspectives as artist and analyst are the building blocks of his philosophy: he considers life, reviews the years, takes another look at the spectacle of the world, evaluates things both seen and told, compares its diverse contents, reconciles memory with experience, and composes an account with the pen of a character-author. In composing his theater of the world, Machado reconsiders experience from the outside, once again looking onto the spectacle of the world, while from the inside he observes the stage where human affairs are subjected to catharsis, illusion, dissimulation, and deception. On this stage is the superior humor of Don Quixote, capable of admiring the nobility of human illusion and failure.

Thérèse was a writer for her community, composing plays and poems for particular festive occasions. She also wrote over two hundred letters, some of them rich in Christological perception, but her most important script was her self-portrait: first, of her childhood; second, of herself in her last retreat; third, in her confession of feeling cut off from God, as though in a tunnel, a vault, a fog. This chapter dwells upon that confession, and where it leads her. It ends with the universal community of the spiritually lost, the many stray souls such as Christ comes to minister.

This chapter reviews and critiques the conventional wisdom that fervent Trump supporters are distinguished by their demographic, personality, and emotional profiles. The standard narrative, drawn in part from 2016 exit polls, asserts that Trump supporters are old, male, white, uneducated, poor, rural, religious, neurotic, bitter, angry, resentful, adrift, and fearful, but this chapter suggests that although several of the demographic claims have some truth, many Trump supporters are in fact female, college educated, suburban, and well to do. With regard to personality and emotions, Trump supporters are not as neurotic as liberals and actually rank lower than those with other political orientations on most negative emotions, including bitterness, anger, resentment, and fear. Compared to those who do not like Trump, many fervid Trump supporters appear to be less threatened by most aspects of life with the possible exception of outsiders.

Shedding lights on biological episodes in Beckett’s writing, Julie Campbell in this chapter focuses specifically on the fear of diving that he experienced at six years old, which recurs from the early poem ‘For Future Reference’ to the later fiction Company, and analyses how and why it was traumatic for him. The incident, together with the shame and the sense of guilt he felt in mourning his father’s death, traumatised him. Beckett’s trauma, caused by his remorseful feeling that he had betrayed his father’s expectations, is perhaps most strongly reflected by the character Henry in Beckett’s radio play Embers. Henry is obsessed with the death of his father, who drowned at sea but whose body was not found. Henry denies his father’s death as if trying to expunge it from his memory. His distress, anger, bitterness, and confusion are expressed in his commands of his own actions and of the story of Bolton and Holloway. The radio listeners witness Henry’s inner feelings and share in his suffering.

Considering the great panoply of chemicals and chemical reactions that occur in beer, this chapter provides an insight into the chemistry and mechanism of sunstruck reaction, and its contribution to beer skunkiness. The sunstruck reaction involves photolysis of iso-alpha acid and the combination of one fragment with sulfur to form foul-smelling prenyl-mercaptan whenever beer is exposed to light. Mercaptan causes skunkiness in beer. The presence of alpha and beta acids in hop plants varies in accordance with hop variety and the environment in which the plant is grown. Brewing and transforming alpha acids into iso-alpha acids, a constituent contributing to beer bitterness, is described along with photochemical conversion of beta acids to alpha acids.

This chapter presents a reading of four novels—Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood (2005), Martín Limón's The Door to Bitterness (2005), and Mario Acevedo's The Nymphos of Rocky Flats (2006) and The Undead Kama Sutra (2008)—and explores the connections between nativism and imperial capital through the figure of the Chicana/o detective. Detective fiction thematizes surveillance and paranoia, both of which emerge as products of the War on Terror, and are represented in the novels in three domains: the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, technologies of surveillance, and discourses of international trade in people and commodities. The novels trace a progression through the shifting spaces of Chicana/o literature and provide a discursive map of its global engagement. This spatial progression charts an expanding arena for Chicana/o racial and ethnic identity, while arguing for a definition of chicanismo as acritical mode of engaging with U.S. power.

This chapter considers what happens to anger when people’s hopes for repair in the face of injustice are not realized. It argues that anger can evolve into the emotion of bitterness. Bitterness is a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that an injustice or other moral wrong will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. And despite its unfortunate reputation as an inherently bad and destructive emotion, bitterness can be a prudentially rational, fitting, and morally appropriate response to injustice. Although it can lead to despair and inaction, some people who are bitter continue to be motivated to act against injustice even without hope that their efforts will be successful.

The concluding chapter offers a summary of the key arguments in the book, situating them within the context of ongoing injustice and suggesting new questions that emerge for scholars working on hope and related topics. Drawing upon the emotional economy of hope, anger, bitterness, and faith under oppression defended in the book, it suggests the need for an ethics and politics of hope more generally, attention to human difference in theorizing the virtue of hope, further inquiry into the nature of despair, and further discussion of collective hope and other emotions in the pursuit of a more just world.