Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior

Robie, a New Zealand journalist who was on board the Rainbow Warrior for 11 weeks, won a Media Peace Prize for his reporting of the ship's final voyage and its destruction in Auckland harbor in 1985 by French security agents, who sought to keep the environmental organization from monitoring and blocking its nuclear testing program in the South Pacific. But this book, originally published in New Zealand, is disorganized and sloppily written and does Greenpeace's cause a disservice. Robie backtracks and jumps ahead in time, making it difficult to understand the chronology of events. And the cast of characters seems even larger than it is because many people are introduced and reintroduced two, even three, times. Geared to a New Zealand audience, the book leaves unexplained various aspects of South Pacific culture, and some of Robie's descriptions of Americafor example, he calls residents of Jacksonville, Fla., ""hillbillies''are unintentionally funny. The destruction of parts of the South Pacific by nuclear testing is a problem with wide-ranging implications, but the author overstates his message, and his ``us against the establishment'' attitude is unlikely to appeal to anyone but the previously converted. (July)