Clavell's fifth novel in his Asian saga (King Rat, Tai-Pan, Shogun, Noble House) is a 1,216-page superblockbuster adventure story set in revolutionary Iran, between February 9 and March 4, 1979, long before the hostage crisis but with Shah Pahlavi just having left the country and Khomeini waiting in the wings. Scot Gavallan, son of the chairman and managing director of S-G, a Britishrun helicopter company servicing the government-owned oil fields in Iran, has his hands full trying to keep his fleet operational. Guerney Aviation, the American helicopter outfit, has pulled out of Iran, to cut its foreseeable upcoming losses. S-G's operations have doubled with the American pullout, but its corporate headquarters in Hong Kong (where S-G is secretly owned by the vast Noble House conglomerate run by Linbar Struan) also sees a British pullout ahead, since the fanatical revolutionaries will undoubtedly nationalize the fleet and bring financial ruin to S-G. Can Scot get his big international team and their choppers safely out of Iran? In the whirlwind wrath of God upon the infidels in Iran, the rioting madness of political and religious mobs, and the blades of the whirlybirds seeking escape in Gavallan's Operation Whirlwind (by the birds being secretly dismantled and stripped via Jumbo jet freighter), the novel is well-titled. Among the blast of subplots are the tragic love of pilot Tom Lochart for the ravishing Muslim Sharazad, with their memorably explosive last kiss; the struggle of Andrew Gavallan, Scot's father, with Linbar for control of Noble House and a takeover by Scot; the story of the loving Azadeh and her pilot husband, the giant, knife-bearing Finn Erikki Yokkonen's resistence to KGB agent Fedor Rakoczy, and then, Rakoczy's own descent into horror. Aside from length, Whirlwind is an achievement, distinguishable from dozens of zippy page-turners this year by the density of its experience of modern, tortured Iran. Tremendous readership assured.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1986
ISBN: 0340766182
Page Count: 1248
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1986
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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