Robert S. Norris, an eighteen-year veteran with NRDC's nuclear program, has just released Racing for the Bomb (Steerforth Press, 722 pp., $40), an in-depth biography of Leslie R. Groves, the army general who oversaw the Manhattan Project. Some might think it's odd,...

Yoes, Sean Baltimore Afro-American 04-15-2000 Was Norris inevitable? "THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISION I'VE EVER MADE..." With these words Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley introduced then Baltimore City Police Col. Ron Daniel as Commissioner of the beleaguered Baltimore City Police Department...

It is against a background such as the entrenchment of poetry in a previous tradition of thought about Nature that Leslie Norris's poem "Mountains Polecats Pheasants" has to be seen. It is elegiac, regretting the mortality of creatures and places before the encroachment of machines such as the motor car, which, in the poem, replace polecats as killers of pheasant. Norris's poem is reminiscent of William Stafford's American version of the subject in "Travelling Throu...

[The luminous short stories in Sliding] have the coherence of a novel. They are linked not by plot but by place and point of view. Most of them begin with a seemingly transient happening that signifies something much larger in the narrator's past. The title story, about a group of boys sliding on a frozen pond, captures the freshness of a first time experience and its bittersweet memory…. All of the stories spring from the soil of the Welsh countryside, where even trivia is given a special rad...

What one misses, for most of Leslie Norris's … collection, Mountains Pheasants Polecats and other elegies, is the sense of tension creating a movement of style. Elegy can be a paradoxical form, possessing an adroitness in direct ratio to its emotive charge. As Auden proved, the more risks you take with it, the more passionate the balance you can finally achieve. So, here, the human elegies have more daring, and more weight: whereas those for vanishing life forms seem a little inhibited, rather...