by David Hambling ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005
An entertaining companion to Tom Schachtman’s Terrors and Marvels (2002) and other entries in the little library of war-born...
Where would Virgin Atlantic and the Gap be without Hitler and Khrushchev?
War breeds technological innovation; that much is well known. London-based science writer Hambling takes a leisurely ramble through the back pages of WWII and Cold War history to show how ordinary consumers—to say nothing of armies—have benefited from martial inventions, a story that is less well known. Take, to name an even earlier example, the Burberry trench coat: A fashion favorite ever since it was introduced in 1901 as a British army raincoat, it still contains epaulettes for holding caps and gloves and rings on which to string grenades. And then there’s the T-shirt, born in 1942 as the US Navy’s T-type undershirt, which, after the war ended, “went back to civilian life with the returning veterans, and has gone from strength to strength ever since.” In just such a process, commercial jet aircraft were born of battle; among the other democratizing effects of WWII was the drop in airfare, for, as Hambling reckons, to fly from London to Australia before the war would have cost something like $35,000 in today’s money, whereas after the war “long-haul travel was no longer for the leisured classes.” In similar vein, the modern DVD resulted from the long and maniacal quest for the ultimate “death ray,” which is also yielding a variety of nonlethal, large-scale, Taser-like weapons that one day police squads and armies will be merrily using on crowds of rioters and insurgents. Each advance in technology, Hambling shows, has its upside and downside: Ground-penetrating radar, for instance, has enabled rescuers to find skiers buried in avalanches and detectives the bodies of long-disappeared murder victims, but kindred millimeter wave imaging devices may one day soon show the world just what’s in your pocket. And that would be a boon for entrepreneurs: As Hambling remarks, “Given the tabloids’ willingness to pay big money for scandal stories, it is easy to see how you could recoup the cost of an MMW imager fairly quickly.”
An entertaining companion to Tom Schachtman’s Terrors and Marvels (2002) and other entries in the little library of war-born technology.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1561-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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