An expert’s comprehensive, sobering investigation.
Career energy-reporter Maize scours decades of American nuclear policy and finds enough harebrained schemes to fill up an entire field of defunct missile silos.
In 1945, the terrible power of the atom was unleashed, evidenced by the charred, twisted bodies that littered the ruins of Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even so, some of Uncle Sam’s finest scientific minds couldn’t help but wonder what other miracles the mighty atom might next achieve. Among the many ideas pursued by these scientists—and supported by their political patrons—were attempts to strap nuclear reactors onto the wings of airplanes, resurfacing the face of the Earth with atomic blasts and shooting astronauts into deep space via atomic-powered flatulence. In fact, according to the author, the boys from the lab grew so cocky after the success of the A-bomb that they seemed to have more in common with fictional boy-genius Tom Swift than any rational flesh-and-blood adult charged with making important policy decisions. Maize recounts the dizzying heights of this group’s collective hubris in dense but sobering detail. Not much of the United States’ more than 60 years of atomic history appears to escape his scrutiny or expertise, whether scientific or political. Sadly, this book may not find a large audience among general readers because much of the material is accessible to only the most informed energy specialists. However, the author’s catalogue of the wrongheaded notions involved in formulating U.S. energy policy to date is crucial knowledge for those tasked with forming American energy policy in the future. As the author poignantly demonstrates, U.S. scientists and policymakers still don’t know what to do with the mounds of nuclear waste piling up around the nation’s remaining nuclear power stations. Despite all this, he warns, the love affair with the atom persists.
An expert’s comprehensive, sobering investigation.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466420526
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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