A lively narrative slickly done: nothing wrong with that, but intelligent readers who like their history straight up may...
The creator of the immensely popular series of marine and underwater adventures starring Dirk Pitt (Valhalla Rising, 2001, etc.) returns with a sequel to his nonfiction Sea Hunters (1996).
Cussler’s flair as a novelist often bleeds into his real-life adventures with an ad hoc group of companions variously skilled in the arts of shipwreck hunting that now bears the imprimatur of National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), borrowed from the fictional entity of the same name. This is not to imply any distortion of key facts (more on that later), but it does allow Cussler and NUMA cohort Dirgo to weave corking good stories around episodes that are often equal parts adventure and misadventure. NUMA’s mission is to locate wrecks, not salvage them; nobody dives down, for instance, to tangle with a giant squid over a chest of doubloons. And here, towing a Magnetic Anomaly Detector over the seabed or riverbed to pinpoint where a wreck is not (in the case of Lieutenant John F. Kennedy’s PT 109) easily passes for a bona fide adventure. Threats of weather and wave occasionally loom, but more often botched plane reservations or cafes that don’t stock the right brand of hot sauce are the drolly rendered impedimenta. Exhaustive research on intended targets like the “ghost ship” Mary Celeste, the Civil War vessel U.S.S. Mississippi, and particularly the siege of Charleston, which cost the Union so dearly in ironclads and their crews, is genuinely illuminating, and the events often fascinatingly told. Cussler, however, belongs to that genre of writers who are somehow informed by the Almighty as to the precise final words, thoughts, and actions of those about to succumb (in this case to maritime disasters), so that hypothesis is not an issue to be flagged.
A lively narrative slickly done: nothing wrong with that, but intelligent readers who like their history straight up may find it simply annoying.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14925-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.
A fresh, urbane history of the dramatic and melodramatic belle epoque.
When Barnes (The Only Story, 2018, etc.), winner of the Man Booker Prize and many other literary awards, first saw John Singer Sargent’s striking portrait of Dr. Samuel Pozzi—handsome, “virile, yet slender,” dressed in a sumptuous scarlet coat—he was intrigued by a figure he had not yet encountered in his readings about 19th-century France. The wall label revealed that Pozzi was a gynecologist; a magazine article called him “not only the father of French gynecology, but also a confirmed sex addict who routinely attempted to seduce his female patients.” The paradox of healer and exploiter posed an alluring mystery that Barnes was eager to investigate. Pozzi, he discovered, succeeded in his amorous affairs as much as in his acclaimed career. “I have never met a man as seductive as Pozzi,” the arrogant Count Robert de Montesquiou recalled; Pozzi was a “man of rare good sense and rare good taste,” “filled with knowledge and purpose” as well as “grace and charm.” The author’s portrait, as admiring as Sargent’s, depicts a “hospitable, generous” man, “rich by marriage, clubbable, inquisitive, cultured and well travelled,” and brilliant. The cosmopolitan Pozzi, his supercilious friend Montesquiou, and “gentle, whimsical” Edmond de Polignac are central characters in Barnes’ irreverent, gossipy, sparkling history of the belle epoque, “a time of vast wealth for the wealthy, of social power for the aristocracy, of uncontrolled and intricate snobbery, of headlong colonial ambition, of artistic patronage, and of duels whose scale of violence often reflected personal irascibility more than offended honor.” Dueling, writes the author, “was not just the highest form of sport, it also required the highest form of manliness.” Barnes peoples his history with a spirited cast of characters, including Sargent and Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt (who adored Pozzi), Henry James and Proust, Pozzi’s diarist daughter, Catherine, and unhappy wife, Therese, and scores more.
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65877-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
It took 14 years to build and it cost 15 million dollars and the lives of 20 workmen. Like the Atlantic cable and the Suez Canal it was a gigantic embodiment in steel and concrete of the Age of Enterprise. McCullough's outsized biography of the bridge attempts to capture in one majestic sweep the full glory of the achievement but the story sags mightily in the middle. True, the Roeblings, father and son who served successively as Chief Engineer, are cast in a heroic mold. True, too, the vital statistics of the bridge are formidable. But despite diligent efforts by the author the details of the construction work — from sinking the caissons, to underground blasting, stringing of cables and pouring of cement — will crush the determination of all but the most indomitable reader. To make matters worse, McCullough dutifully struggles through the administrative history of the Brooklyn Bridge Company which financed and contracted for the project with the help of the Tweed Machine and various Brooklyn bosses who profited handsomely amid continuous allegations of kickbacks and mismanagement of funds. He succeeds in evoking the venality and crass materialism of the epoch but once again the details — like the 3,515 miles of steel wire in each cable — are tiresome and ultimately entangling. Workmanlike and thorough though it is, McCullough's history of the bridge has more bulk than stature.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1972
ISBN: 0743217373
Page Count: 652
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1972
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