In this compelling account, retired combat veteran Cutler (Strategy/US Naval Academy; Brown Water, Black Berets, 1988) offers balanced criticism and praise of the American performance in a critical WW II battle. In October 1944, in an attempt to force a battle that would turn the tide of the war, Japanese fleets opposed General MacArthur's amphibious operations on the island of Leyte in the Philippines. Cutler shows how the American Third and Seventh fleets, which were combined to support operations on Leyte, were attacked by Japanese naval forces under Admiral Kurita; with total air superiority and a formidable attacking submarine force for which the Japanese had no counterpart, Cutler argues, the American forces should have had no difficulty achieving victory. Indeed, American air attacks in the Subuyan Sea on October 24, 1944, together with coordinated American submarine attacks, inflicted great damage on Kurita's ships. However, Admiral Ozawa, commanding a separate Japanese fleet from north of Leyte, feinted an all-out attack on American Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet, persuading Halsey that a large Japanese carrier force was attacking and diverting his fleet away from the battle. Cutler argues that if separate Japanese fleets under admirals Shima and Nishimura had been able to merge their fleets with Kurita's and coordinate their attacks, and if Kurita had not broken off the battle when a crucial task force of the Seventh Fleet was nearly exhausted, a major American defeat might have resulted. In the event, uncoordinated Japanese attacks (most notably, the destructive kamikaze attacks that were the first use of suicide fliers against American ships during the war) against an outnumbered American adversary resulted in a battle that was hugely costly on both sides, but that did not stop the American forces from achieving their strategic objectives in the Philippines. A well-researched, carefully reasoned account of the little- studied battle that made ultimate American victory in the Pacific inevitable.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-016949-4
Page Count: 338
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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