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
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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