A little-known slice of Cold War history, as experienced by an insider and vividly retold by an old pro.
Nonfiction thriller about the Soviet naval mutiny that inspired The Hunt for Red October.
Veteran novelist Hagberg (Allah’s Scorpion, 2007, etc.) teams with Gindin, one of the officers aboard the ship, who is now a U.S. citizen. FFG Storozhevoy was an antisubmarine frigate, a long, narrow, fast ship designed to hunt and destroy U.S. nuclear subs. In November 1975, the ship was in harbor at Riga, Latvia, being made ready for two weeks of repairs after a six-month cruise. Senior Lieutenant Gindin, at 24 a proud member of the Soviet navy, was in charge of the engine room. Hagberg conveys the barriers Gindin had to overcome as a Jew in the Soviet system while laying groundwork for the plot by Captain Valery Sablin, the ship’s third in command. The abundant details about running the ship and daily life in the Soviet navy are sure to please military buffs and techno-thriller fans alike. But at the narrative’s center stands the enigmatic Sablin, a true believer in the ideals of Marxism/Leninism who was appalled by the corruption of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. Believing that a majority of his fellow Russians shared his vision of a free Rodina (motherland), he planned to sail the ship near Leningrad and broadcast a tape pleading for the bureaucrats’ overthrow. At first, his scheme succeeded. He tricked Captain Anatoly Potulniy, the ship’s commander, into a locked room and armed enough crewmen to imprison those officers who did not support him. Then Sablin’s luck began to run out. His tape, rather than being broadcast, was sent out on an encrypted military channel. One officer escaped to spread the alarm. Whatever chance the mutiny had of succeeding was gone as soon as the Kremlin learned of it. Hagberg manages to build and maintain the suspense even though readers know that the plot’s failure is preordained.
A little-known slice of Cold War history, as experienced by an insider and vividly retold by an old pro.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1350-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
An authoritative account from Civil War historian Davis (Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour, 1991) of the would-be Founding Fathers of the Confederacy. In February 1861, delegates from six states in the Deep South met in Montgomery, Ala., to form their own nation. Despite constant invocations of the spirit of 1776, their movement, in their own view, aimed at reform rather than revolution. Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) traces how the delegates hammered out a constitution that protected slavery, selected Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens as provisional president and vice president, and erected the jerry-built governmental apparatus that would turn their dreams of secession into reality. They were a varied lot, from ``fire-eaters'' who expected a swift, comparatively bloodless separation from the Union, to reluctant secessionists who correctly feared a slaughter. By May 1861, when the capital was moved to Richmond, Va., the seeds of the new government's destruction had already been planted. Davis disputes the often-suggested epitaph for the Confederacy, ``Died of States Rights,'' but his own account demonstrates that the correct label might better read, ``Died of States Rights and Swollen Egos.'' However idealistic the delegates might have been initially, by the time they moved to Richmond they were already beginning to regard Jefferson Davis with suspicion, arrogance, and frustrated ambition. Believing that ``the finest statesmen the South had to offer composed that Provisional Congress,'' William Davis is more charitable than the group deserves, and his narrative moves slowly. But he makes fine use of hundreds of often previously unpublished letters, diaries, and memoirs, and he deftly captures the capital's climate as officeholders, office seekers, lobbyists, businessmen, and transients joined the mosquitoes in infesting Montgomery. Despite its flaws, a useful history of a relatively undercovered aspect of the Civil War. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-907735-4
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
The grand sweep of American history is writ small in this family history/memoir by humorist Frazier (Great Plains, 1989, etc.). Frazier undertook this effort after his parents died in the late 1980s, to ``find a meaning that would defeat death.'' But his project seems more complicated and self-conscious, if not pretentious: an attempt to somehow reclaim American history for himself, a white Protestant. His preoccupation with his own religious doubt, contrasted with the firm faith of his ancestors- -whether German Reformed, Old School Presbyterian, or, like his great-great-grandfather Simeon Frazier, a member of the antiauthoritarian Disciples of Christ—culminates in a strange, reductionist review of American history as an expression of the decline of Protestant faith. More broadly, Frazier shares indiscriminately with us every detail he has been able to root out: from the momentous (the arrival of Thomas Benedict on these shores in 1638 and his descendant Platt Benedict's founding of Norwalk, Ohio) to the trivial (his great-great-uncle Charles's first attempt at fly-fishing and his grandmother's showing family pictures to Tennessee Williams in Key West). The quantity of information that could have rendered full-blooded portraits of long-ago generations is lacking; the lengthy catalogs often offered (trite entries from a great-grandfather's school diary, quotations from his parents' rather ordinary love letters) seem like fillers. The histories of the Fraziers, Wickhams, Benedicts, and Hurshes do follow the outlines of American history: the push west (all his relatives ended up in Ohio); the Civil War (Norwalk was a stop on the underground railroad); industrialization (his father became a chemist for Sohio). But Frazier's prose is flat as a prairie and his humor dry as stone. Only at the end, in interviews with two colorful relatives, and with the description of the deaths of his teenage brother Fritz from leukemia and of his parents, does the tale reach emotional heights. An object lesson in the pitfalls of writing a family history for anyone other than your family. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-15319-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
