A riveting account (with an introduction by Tom Clancy) of a hell-and-high-water incident toward the Cold War's end, in which a missile-bearing Soviet submarine sank within a few hundred miles of North Carolina. Drawing on interviews with survivors, declassified archival material, and other sources, Huchthausen (coauthor of Echoes of the Mekong, 1996) and his collaborators (White is the author of a forthcoming thriller, Siberian Light) offer a dramatic log detailing the last voyage of the USSR's K-219. The oceangoing equivalent of a rattletrap, the aging nuclear-powered vessel left its Barents Sea base early in September 1986. One month later, the sub was on station between Bermuda and America's East Coast. In maneuvering to evade the US Navy submarine shadowing it, the K-219 suffered irreparable damage to an already leaky missile silo. Seawater poured into the rupture, mixing with liquid fuel to create clouds of lethal gas. The craft went into a near-fatal dive, but Captain Igor Britanov managed to get it to the surface. Dead in the water, with both her reactors out of commission, the K-219 was on fire belowdecks. Moscow directed Britanov to salvage his moribund sub, thus risking an explosion that might have carried deadly radiation all along the East Coast. But the skipper (who got all but four of his crew out alive) disobeyed orders and scuttled the K-219 under the watchful eyes of American forces; the 10,000-ton hulk now lies some three miles below sea level; her nuclear-tipped missiles have presumably been swept away by the Gulf Stream. A stranger-than-fiction saga in which men who must battle the sea and stand lonely watches inside enemy lines are betrayed by the technology assumed to be their motherland's salvation. An HBO movie with the same title will air this summer. (First serial to Reader's Digest)
Pub Date: July 26, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16928-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A reconstruction that may prove valuable in its own right, but as a source of illumination of contemporary treatment of...
Lawyer and legal scholar Gordon aims to set forth the bloody history of Nat Turner’s campaign against white slave owners and evaluate it in the context of homeland terrorist attacks, most notably 9/11.
In 1831, Virginian field slave Turner and a band of other slaves and freed blacks launched a bloody battle. Their rebellion was put down within 48 hours, but not before they had managed to slaughter some 55 white men, women and children. Though the book’s title suggests that its emphasis is on the trials of Turner and his followers, Gordon spends even more pages of this slim tome meticulously reconstructing the events leading up to the rebellion and sorting through the hearsay of what actually happened. Carefully footnoted, the compelling story of how a literate, religious field hand came to believe he was the second coming of the Messiah, destined to raise an army to kill his oppressors, makes an interesting read. Yet Gordon’s painstaking, and sometimes repetitive, efforts better describe the insurrection’s roots than its repercussions. The author loses momentum when he reaches what should be the payoff–how the rebels’ trials were handled. After the first few days of vigilante violence to quash the revolt, Gordon argues, due process was restored–more than a third of the accused were found innocent—and tempered with mercy, as then-Virginia Gov. John Floyd commuted many of the death sentences issued by the courts to transportation, or being sold in another state. But although Gordon details the separate, unequal justice process reserved for slaves, the parallels he draws between the Nat Turner rebellion and 9/11 are underdeveloped and belated, as much of the contemporary material is relegated to a series of appendices that feel like afterthoughts.
A reconstruction that may prove valuable in its own right, but as a source of illumination of contemporary treatment of terrorists ultimately it lacks satisfying insights.Pub Date: May 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-2983-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A welcome contribution to frontier history.
A persuasive effort to locate the origins of the American Revolution not in Boston Harbor but in the dense woodlands of western Pennsylvania.
The Black Boys Rebellion, commemorated in the 1939 John Wayne vehicle Allegheny Uprising, takes its name from a Pennsylvania militia outfit’s practice of dressing in Indian garb and blackening their faces before going into the field. They had formed to battle Indian raids on what was then British America’s far western frontier. At the conclusion of the Seven Years War, the British Crown had decided to make peace with the Indian nations, in part by forbidding Americans from settling in country that they regarded as rightfully theirs. “Colonists in war-torn regions felt there could be no peace with Native Americans,” writes Spero (Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania, 2016, etc.), the librarian of the American Philosophical Society. “These colonists instead saw Native groups as threats that needed to be removed.” When the British government sent agents to the frontier to bring trade goods as peace offerings to the Natives, the militia turned their arms on their colonial masters. Although the story of their rebellion is in itself a small one relative to the larger history of the British Empire in North America, Spero does a good job of examining its implications. There was a class element, for example, in the hope of landholders to slowly settle the West “instead of permitting colonists to pursue their desire for unfettered expansion,” and there were significant differences in the attitudes of the first frontier president, Andrew Jackson, and predecessors such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in how Native peoples were to be treated. Interestingly, the author also locates an early stirring of the Second Amendment in Black Boys’ leader James Smith, who drafted the revolutionary constitution of Pennsylvania that asserted that “the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state.”
A welcome contribution to frontier history.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63470-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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