Although the Armstrong character—a macho man with a laudable mission—occasionally calls to mind a comic-book superhero,...
The street-savvy founder of the Seekers (a group of bounty hunters who see their mission as not just finding men who have skipped bail but saving their souls as well) briskly recounts his own life and the work of his unique organization.
When Armstrong, a self-educated African-American from Elizabeth, New Jersey, captures a fugitive at home, he leaves a copy of a 17th-century prayer behind to comfort the man's family, and when new members join the Seekers, they must take up both rigorous physical training and the reading of ancient Egyptian philosophy. Armstrong's memoirs, written with the assistance of crime writer Bruno (The Iceman, 1993, etc.), are fast-paced and packed with gritty detail about what bounty hunters do and how they do it in an ugly, dirty, drug-ridden, and dangerous world. Armstrong left New Jersey after high school, became a fisherman in Alaska, and, in the off-season, learned first-hand how not to catch a fugitive and then picked up the basics of the trade. Influenced by New Age bookstore owner Kanya McGee, he became interested in self-improvement through meditation and the study of Eastern philosophy, taking as his goal to become "a stellar man in a world that desperately needs stellar men." When he returned to New Jersey in the 1980s, he developed the idea of a bounty hunting operation that would "combine compassion and street smarts." While there's ample technical data about the surveillance and protective equipment and the arms that the Seekers carry with them, it is their mode of operation that fascinates. The cases described emphasize intelligence gathering, planning, patience, cool nerves, and teamwork rather than gunslinging; in fact, only once has Armstrong fired his gun during an arrest. His Seekers now hunt fugitives only to fund Earth Church, a center for spiritual, mental, and physical growth.
Although the Armstrong character—a macho man with a laudable mission—occasionally calls to mind a comic-book superhero, Million Man March supporters should find this agreeable reading.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-19343-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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