The horror of war brought pungently to life, with tragedies strewn everywhere, touching everybody.
A horrific piece of British national amnesia bobs to the surface in Fenby's absorbing account of the ill-fated Lancastria.
Although the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in the early summer of 1940 had been a remarkable achievement, it was far from the total success that Winston Churchill claimed. Of the half-million members of the force, 150,000 remained in France. Perhaps as many as 6,000 of those unlucky souls, along with a number of women and children, boarded the Lancastria, a converted Cunard liner, in the days before June 17, when a German dive-bomber dropped four bombs on the ship. Within 20 horrible minutes, described in detail through a rich collection of firsthand narratives, the vessel turned turtle and sank. At least 3,500 died, maybe 4,000. Churchill ordered an immediate gag on the catastrophe. So much was going wrong at the time—France was suing for peace, invasion forces were massing on the other side of the Channel, the Luftwaffe was clearly getting ready to bomb British cities—that he feared for the British spirit. Then, “in the rush of events, as he put it, he forgot to lift the ban.” And so the greatest maritime disaster of the 1900s went missing. Fenby (Chiang Kai-Shek, 2004, etc.), however, has done a thorough job of interviewing the survivors (who still hold an annual memorial service), gaining pictures of what it was like simply getting to St-Nazaire, where the ship was anchored; the atmosphere aboard; and then what it was like to be in the drink, amid burning oil, with planes sweeping in to machine-gun the survivors. The writer provides startling imagery—because of the all the men clinging to the hull, the turned-over Lancastria resembles a whale in khaki—and good stories, like the one of French girls dispensing wine-bottle corks to plug strafing holes in rowboats.
The horror of war brought pungently to life, with tragedies strewn everywhere, touching everybody.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1532-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
A convincing and discouraging argument that the Texas model of a profit-making, retributive prison system has become the...
An intensively researched, disturbing history of American penology focusing on the state with the largest prison system—Texas.
In his debut, Perkinson (American Studies/Univ. of Hawaii) asserts that criminologists traditionally study early New England reformatories, foreboding public institutions meant to restore wayward citizens to virtue that evolved into modern correctional bureaucracies still pursuing, however imperfectly, the ideal of reform. The author maintains that America always supported an alternative, purely punitive penology that originated in the slave-holding South and which, with the triumph of conservatives after the 1970s, is now the norm. Texas, rural and tolerant of violence between whites, arrested few people before 1865, but this changed with emancipation, when suppressing blacks became an obsessive priority. Unwilling to spend tax money, former Confederate states hired out prisoners to the highest bidder, where they worked as slaves. This was profitable, so when publicity about corruption and brutality forced states to discontinue “leasing out,” they substituted state-run plantations, mines and factories where conditions were hardly better. Class-action lawsuits during the civil-rights furor in the 1960s and ’70s produced draconian court decisions ordering reform. Some improvement occurred but many rulings were simply ignored, and by the ’80s Americans were so responsive to law-and-order appeals, and U.S. prison populations were mushrooming so rapidly, that there was no money to spare. Ironically, writes Perkinson, skyrocketing costs—Texas spends $3 billion per year—have produced the first conservative voices suggesting that matters are out of hand.
A convincing and discouraging argument that the Texas model of a profit-making, retributive prison system has become the national template.Pub Date: March 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8069-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
A collection of wondrous tales that present ancient myths as the proto–science fiction stories they are.
A fascinating unpacking of ancient myths that feature robots and other lifelike beings, some of which bear an eerie resemblance to modern technology.
More than 2,000 years ago, Greek thinkers were already envisioning the spectacular potential of being “made, not born.” As Mayor (The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, 2014, etc.), a research scholar in classics and the history of science at Stanford, writes, during ancient times, “we…find a remarkable set of concepts and ideas that arose in mythology, stories that envisioned ways of imitating, augmenting, and surpassing natural life by means that might be termed bio-techne, ‘life through craft’…ancient versions of what we now call biotechnology.” The bronze giant Talos, protector of Crete, appears in numerous poems and artworks, some dating to 500 B.C.E.; Jason, of the Argonauts, is depicted as battling a phalanx of robotlike soldiers sprung from the earth and programmed to kill. Of course, these episodes are fiction, but they reveal the sophistication of the ancients’ imagined automata. In her meticulous research, the author discovers that the Greeks were hardly alone in conceiving mechanistic warriors, servants, or evil human replicas. Surviving myths from Rome, India, and China also explore ideas of artificial life and intelligence. In her insightful analyses of these tales, Mayor is approachable and engaging, and she infuses many familiar stories with new energy in the context of technology. She adroitly explores the ethical aspects of artificial life, addressing big questions about sentience and agency through the lens of ancient ideas. She also makes a convincing argument that these imagined machines anticipated advances that are considered cutting-edge today. Ultimately, she leaves readers in awe of these thinkers who dreamed of “androids” long before it was conceivable to build them.
A collection of wondrous tales that present ancient myths as the proto–science fiction stories they are.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-18351-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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