April
12, 2002
Front-Page
News
Darlington’s Rise Darlington’s Fall: A Novel
in Verse (Alfred A. Knopf), a recently released novel written
entirely in verse by Brad Leithauser, MHC Emily Dickinson Lecturer
in the Humanities, just received three rave reviews from national
publications. Reviewers praised both the work’s form, the
book-length narrative poem, and its content, the story of a fictional
nineteenth-century naturalist named Russel Darlington. David Yezzi,
in a March 22 review titled “A Story through Time, Told in
Rhyme” in the Wall Street Journal, called the novel
“witty and elegant.” In “On a Wing and a Verse,”
his review in the March 31 Los Angeles Times, Jonathan
Levi writes that Leithauser has “allowed himself to fall
under the spell of a Midwestern naturalist who dreams great dreams.
The result is charming and quite wonderful.” Finally, Michael
Lind, in his review titled “Verse in Nature” in the
March 31 Washington Post, lauds Leithauser as well. “Brad
Leithauser unites his skill as a storyteller with his craft as
a poet in this gentle and elegant novel in verse,” writes
Lind. “In this tour de force of the poet’s craft, the
names of academic disciplines resound with the exotic glamour
of epic catalogue, and artful mythological allusion links the
new world of science to the classical literary tradition. In Darlington’s
Fall, Brad Leithauser proves that the universe of science,
no less than the inner life of the individual, can be the stuff
of poetry.”
That Sinking Feeling The April 3 Boston Globe featured
a review titled “This Armada Had Sinking Feeling from Start”
of The Tsar’s Last Armada:The Epic Voyage to the Battle
of Tsushima (Basic Books) a recently released book by Constantine
V. Pleshakov, a Russian-born and trained historian and MHC visiting
assistant professor of Russian and Eurasian studies. The 369-page
book focuses on the 18,000-mile voyage to Tsushima of a fifty-ship
armada that Russia sent to fight Japan in 1905. It was an attempt
to avenge the Japanese attack on the Russian military base at
Port Arthur in northern China—the opening clash of the Russo-Japanese
War. The Russian ships were ultimately annihilated by the Japanese
at Tsushima in a sea battle that has become famous—ranking
in fame right up there with Trafalgar and Midway and the destruction
of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel in 1588. Writes Globe
correspondent Michael Kenney, “In Pleshakov’s telling,
the incidents of the voyage are so astonishing and rendered with
such attention to colorful detail that the battle is almost an
anticlimax.”
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