A remarkable peek into the ascendancy of the Nazi Party in Germany and the march to global conflict.
A debut biography recounts a man’s perilous adventures during both world wars.
John Harrington grew up in the Australian Outback in Fremantle in the inaugural years of the 20th century. Since his father lived far away in Sydney and his mother was largely indifferent to his existence, John was raised by Cluba, an aboriginal woman for whom he had a son’s affection. He eventually moved to England for schooling and trained to be an engineer, but once World War I erupted, he joined the reserves and was assigned to the “Signal Section” of the Royal Field Artillery. He was sent to France and soon witnessed up close the carnage of war in Belgium. Badly wounded, he nearly lost his leg to amputation. John returned to England and held several jobs—including reporter and photographer for two newspapers—until he responded to a cryptic advertisement looking for a clerk with German language skills. He was hired as a passport clerk at the British Consulate in Berlin, an office that doubled as the headquarters for the secret service. There John was recruited for various espionage missions, including purloining technical drafts of the German Enigma machine, the famous cryptographic device. Later, during World War II, John worked unofficially for the Royal Air Force, aiding it in locating high-value bomb targets in Berlin. When John was reassigned to England, he was tasked with helping with the Ultra code-breaking machine. The exhilarating book is written by his daughter, D.F. Harrington, based on his oral stories. While the author’s prose lacks any literary quality, it’s dependably lucid, and the work is well-structured. But the principal virtue of the remembrance is the extraordinariness of John’s life—he managed to meet an eclectic cast of historically significant figures, including Harry Houdini, Alfred Hitchcock, and Joseph Goebbels. John nearly went on a date with Eva Braun. In addition, the powerful record provided of Germany’s descent into tyranny under Hitler, including the savage inhospitableness to Jews, is as disturbing as it is edifying.
A remarkable peek into the ascendancy of the Nazi Party in Germany and the march to global conflict.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1008-3
Page Count: 350
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 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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