A fine job of reporting—and a good read for Tom Clancy fans and students of contemporary world politics alike.
English television correspondent Moore crafts a fast-paced, absorbing account of the 2000 sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk and the political intrigues that followed.
The Kursk was a wonder of naval architecture, a giant displacing 23,000 tons and designed to hunt down and destroy aircraft carriers and elude detection by sonar. Commanded by a legendary sailor, it was held by its designers to be unsinkable. Vessels that are not supposed to sink always do, of course, though the Kursk’s fate was particularly gruesome: leaking hydrogen peroxide inside a torpedo casing apparently set off a massive explosion that ripped the guts of the submarine apart. Many sailors were killed immediately, while others drowned as the vessel sank to the floor of the Barents Sea and slowly filled with seawater. Some crewmembers survived but could not escape or make their whereabouts known; the vessel’s emergency buoy had been disabled lest it “accidentally deploy and reveal the sub’s position to Western naval forces,” Moore writes, and few of its safety mechanisms worked. By his account, Western observers had been following the Kursk all along as the Russian ship participated in naval exercises, which made it easy enough for the Western powers to offer to join in rescue efforts. The Russian admiralty was reluctant to accept due to nationalistic pride, fear that military secrets might be given away, and embarrassment that it could not take care of its own emergencies, having starved the navy of an adequate search-and-rescue service. (Moore writes that in 1999 the Northern Fleet requested a million dollars to fund such a service, but was given only fourteen thousand.) In the end, survivors of the explosion having since drowned, it was a combined group of Russian, Norwegian, and English sailors who found the Kursk’s remains, to the deep embarrassment of the Putin government.
A fine job of reporting—and a good read for Tom Clancy fans and students of contemporary world politics alike.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-61000-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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