This well-written history draws connections to an iconic novel and illuminates the lives of World War II sailors.
A story of poor leadership in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
In this debut nonfiction work, Krouse draws connections between his grandfather’s experience on the USS Partridge and Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Caine Mutiny, both stories of ineffective, potentially dangerous captains who created dysfunctional environments on their ships. Krouse doesn’t claim that The Caine Mutiny’s Captain Queeg is in any way based on Adnah Caldin, captain of the Partridge, but uses Wouk’s work as a lens to guide his interpretation of the story he pieces together with help from the surviving sailors. The Partridge began life as a World War I minesweeper, and in World War II, it patrolled the Caribbean until it was transferred to Europe, where its tugboat capabilities were put to work in building the offshore infrastructure that supported the D-Day invasion. Krouse’s grandfather and the other sailors found life on the ship more difficult once Caldin took command, and they often ran afoul of his arbitrary, harsh, or nonsensical orders. When Caldin’s erratic behavior culminated in his leaving the bridge during an emergency, another parallel to The Caine Mutiny, he was removed from command while the Partridge’s construction work led it into danger. Although Caldin was effectively the story’s villain, he was not its center, as Krouse learned from his interviews: “Talking nearly 65 years after events, not one crew member could recall Caldin’s name off the top of their head.” The book tells the stories of many of the Partridge’s sailors, presenting well-rounded portraits of ordinary people in a bad situation. Krouse does a good job of maintaining the tension while slowly revealing the Partridge’s fate, and he does so without veering into melodrama. Wouk’s Navy experience and numerous excerpts from The Caine Mutiny provide a valuable context and a narrative anchor to a story filled with detailed history and persuasive analysis of how one leader failed his men.
This well-written history draws connections to an iconic novel and illuminates the lives of World War II sailors.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-62613-075-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: ATBOSH Media Ltd.
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2019
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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