The Enigma story continues to enthrall and delight, even after 50 years and a few dozen accounts: don’t miss this one....
It wasn’t only a crew of eccentric English mathematicians with brains the size of basketballs who cracked the Germans’ Enigma code during WWII, but a whole cast of spies and soldiers as well, says journalist Sebag-Montefiore in this magnetic story of breaking the cipher.
Not that Sebag-Montefiore downplays the inspired contributions of those famed cryptographers at Bletchley Park (including Alan Turing, the eccentric genius who used to pedal his bike about the countryside wearing a gas mask and kept his coffee mug chained to a radiator). The author spends plenty of time detailing their toils, complete with code-smashing math in appendices. But other players were involved, as well as the workings of fate and dumb luck. There was also more than one Enigma code, and each was more vexing than the last. There were spies who sold early versions of the code to the French, whole companies of men assigned to raiding German vessels (particularly U-boats) for Enigma machines, and an important cast of Polish codebreakers and intelligence officers. Sebag-Montefiore does a masterful job of keeping the suspense ticking as he fills in all the details, for as he makes clear, it was not just breaking the code that was critical, it was keeping that knowledge a secret so as to exploit the information. What made it all so cat-and-mouse—and what keeps the reader on the edge of the seat—was that the Germans were suspicious that Enigma had been compromised (but never enough so to stop using it), Gestapo agents in occupied France were arresting individuals who knew the extent of Allied progress on Enigma, and the Allies themselves didn’t know what had been divulged. The fate of the invasion at Normandy hung in the balance.
The Enigma story continues to enthrall and delight, even after 50 years and a few dozen accounts: don’t miss this one. (photos, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-40738-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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