A definitive introduction to firearms training, helpful for the novice and the expert.
An astonishingly comprehensive guide to the use of firearms.
According to League (The Perfect Pistol Shot, 2017), proper training in the use of a handgun requires a system that addresses the totality of possible circumstances, which presupposes but goes well beyond marksmanship and open-distance shooting. His approach is called Practics (meaning practical tactics), designed to combine the value of several different existing techniques, including point-shooting and aimed-fire shooting, but it also accommodates firing while the shooter is in motion and even while the shooting arm is in motion. And since the vast majority of gunfights occur within close range, the author discusses (in impressive detail) hand-to-hand combat techniques relevant for those circumstances and even subcontact shooting, in which a gun’s muzzle is pressed directly into the target’s flesh at the point of firing. League considers a dizzying array of scenarios—shooting in the dark, shooting around a corner and ricocheting off a wall, shooting while running, warning shots, and a seemingly endless list of others. Also, he discusses the fundamentals of marksmanship, an exhaustive account of the shooter’s tools (from holsters to knives), ambidextrous training, and the proper response to a firearm’s malfunction. The orientation of the book is unyieldingly pragmatic. League relentlessly examines a range of predicaments with which a shooter might be confronted. The entire manual is the equivalent of a three-week training course; the author also provides helpful suggestions about how to follow the prescribed course of study, which includes a surfeit of instructive drills. League was a U.S. Marine Corps marksmanship and close-combat pistol instructor, and his wealth of experience and technical mastery are extraordinary. It’s difficult to imagine what would count as a more thorough treatment of the subject—he includes a discussion of firing straight up into the air and straight down into the ground. Also, the author supplies a searching account of the legal and moral questions that inevitably confront a shooter and the situations within which a “reasonably prudent person” can legitimately resort to deadly force as a matter of self-defense. League doesn’t glamorize or recommend violence—in fact, his book seems designed to correct unrealistic depictions of gun violence peddled in popular culture—but rather attempts to convey the safest and most effective uses of firearms consistent with the law. Occasionally, the author interjects his own political sentiments regarding gun control law, views which are not uncontroversial today and will certainly rankle some readers. Not everyone will agree that the “firearm is a tool for the civilized” or the fact that “the home defender being increasingly scrutinized and caricatured is undeniable.” Some will even be astonished by the pronouncement, delivered sans argument, that “George Zimmerman legally shot Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman had a God-given right, recognized by the U.S. Constitution, to defend himself— and he nearly went to prison for it.” Nevertheless, this is an impressive training manual, written with great clarity and filled with photographs helpfully illustrating its lessons.
A definitive introduction to firearms training, helpful for the novice and the expert.Pub Date: May 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73232-460-2
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Baltimore House
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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