A military version of Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (1981)—with, much higher casualties, of course.
An inside view of the difficult birth of a tactical vehicle that, at least for a time, was a defense contractor’s dream and a politician’s terror.
Dallas Morning News Pentagon correspondent Whittle has been tracking the story of the V-22 Osprey, a “tiltrotor” aircraft—“called that because it tilts two giant rotors on its wingtips upward to take off and land and swivels them forward to fly fast”—since the machine first hit the planning table. Developed at the cost of many Marine lives, victims of numerous crashes during the testing phase, the Osprey program was, by 2000, billions of dollars over budget and nearly a decade behind schedule. Worse, one Marine commander was alleged to have told the technicians under his command to lie about the myriad mechanical problems that emerged in its experimental stages. Bound up in a web of deception, politics and the full weight of the military-industrial complex, the Osprey’s debut in the Iraq War more than 25 years after the program’s initiation, by the author’s view, was entirely appropriate—the two fit each other as “a project sold for a mission one deemed existential, a venture begun under the influence of a dream that soon became a nightmare.” Yet, for all its problems and despite considerable odds, including some conniving by rival helicopter manufacturers and entanglements with the ever-combative Dick Cheney, the high command saw the Osprey as essential to the survival of the Marine Corps, which, given the paucity of opportunities for seaborne invasions of distant shores, found its ability to insert fighters quickly and deeply into enemy territory irresistible. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with key players, including frontline soldiers and contractors at all levels of operation, Whittle skillfully depicts the evolution of the aircraft from drawing board to reality.
A military version of Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (1981)—with, much higher casualties, of course.Pub Date: April 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6295-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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