One of Clifford's best: he keeps chest-thumping to a minimum as he creates a surprising picture of what it was like to be a...
Pirate-relic–hunter Clifford (Expedition Whydah, 1999, etc.) narrates a slice of the Golden Age of Piracy along the Spanish Main in this elucidating study of the buccaneer's life.
The majority of the French Caribbean fleet fell for a Spanish ruse and was shipwrecked off the coast of Venezuela in 1678. Thus, explains the author, commenced a half-century of pirate ascendancy in the region, a sort of OPEC of buccaneers in which disparate but like-minded forces became a powerful alliance holding control over a critical resource—the high seas—though they unraveled as “filibusters tended to come together when it suited them and to go their separate ways when they chose.” Clifford provides snapshot biographies of the principals—Thomas Paine, Chevalier de Grammont, and the runaway slave Laurens de Graffe, perhaps the epitome of dashing, humane pirate—as he describes their activities along the Central and South American coasts for the last quarter of the 17th century (as well as bleeding into the story his own, less beguiling search for pirate remains). What gives Clifford's story its greatest value is the eye-opening information he imparts on the nature of freebooting. A far cry from the Hollywood image, “filibusters,” as pirates were often known, were a prototypical democratic society, fully a third of them were of African descent, having first started out as the equivalent of mountain men, roving about the islands of the Caribbean before the Spanish destroyed their livelihoods and they turned to other quarry. Most of their raiding took place on land rather than sea and, importantly, they often operated with both official and unofficial sanction as agents of various governments. Clifford doesn't suggest they were angels, but instead were a mix of heroes and villains, with as much compromise as havoc in their arsenal.
One of Clifford's best: he keeps chest-thumping to a minimum as he creates a surprising picture of what it was like to be a high-seas rogue before the turn of the 18th century. (Photographs and illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019818-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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