Women spies—often notoriously glamorous and driven as much by the thrills as the cause—have customarily used seduction to get what they want. Betty Pack, the subject of this latest biography by Lovell (The Sound of Wings, 1989; Straight on Till Morning, 1987), was a typical woman spy. Not so typical, though, was the significance of her accomplishment. Acknowledged as responsible for providing some of the most important British communications intelligence of WW II, the American-born Pack was a woman ``who took life as she found it, happily meeting challenge after challenge head-on, no matter what the consequences of the collision.'' Described as the most beautiful debutante of the Washington season, she was married at 19 to Arthur Pack, a British diplomat who had impregnated her. The child's birth was kept a secret for many years as Pack, a ``dreadful parent,'' let her son be reared by a foster family in England. Her espionage activities began while stationed in Civil War Spain and continued when her husband was transferred to Poland, where she seduced a top-ranking Pole from whom she learned details of the German Enigma code-machine. Her most significant triumphs, though, came in Washington. There, she seduced and turned an Italian admiral, as well as a Vichy French diplomat from whom she obtained ciphers that gave the Allies vital information about enemy movements. Loyal but unreflective, Pack had methods that were daring and unorthodox—her after-hours nude appearance at the French Embassy so stunned a suspicious nightwatchman that he fled, facilitating the opening of the safe holding the ciphers. Pack's life in France after the war was poignantly anticlimactic; she began writing her memoirs, but died in 1963 from cancer before they were complete. Solid research and tribute paid where due, though Pack, despite all the glamorous and daring things she did, and despite Lovell's best efforts, never quite comes alive here. Disappointing. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-57556-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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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