A satisfying World War II history.
An account of World War II codebreaking focused more on action than brainwork.
Lachman, executive producer of Inside Edition and author of The Last Lincolns and Footsteps in the Snow, explains that the typewriterlike enigma machine generated critical Nazi communication by scrambling input in billions of ways, and German experts never doubted that its code was unbreakable. However, by 1941, the British were deciphering many messages by ordinary codebreaking brilliance, aided by the earliest computers; despite these successes, actual possession of an enigma machine would make their work easier. All U-boats carried one, but crew invariably destroyed it when threatened with capture. No history of the enigma program—including perhaps the best, Stephen Budiansky’s Battle of Wits—neglects the story of how the Allies hit the jackpot on June 4, 1944, but Lachman tells the fascinating story from the beginning. Opening the book with the U-505 launch in August 1941, the author describes its German crew, the often grotesque conditions inside a U-boat, and the nearly three years of campaigning that featured far more tedium and terror than successful attacks. Lachman does the same with significant American ships and sailors, including Daniel V. Gallery, leader of the antisubmarine task force who, unlike other commanders, had publicly vowed to seize a machine. Few readers will object as Lachman recounts the background, and they will perk up just past the halfway point, when he chronicles how sonar detected U-505. In earlier years, the Allies had captured U-boats, though never fast enough to prevent destruction of its secrets, but Gallery had a trained team ready to go. The author delivers a rousing account of its success. Though Lachman doesn’t claim that the capture of U-505 shortened the war, it was a genuinely heroic act that the author recounts capably.
A satisfying World War II history.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781635768718
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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