A frightening account of film’s supporting role in the development of atomic weaponry.
The story of the link between film and chemical weapons.
Kodak, the company George Eastman founded, may be best known for its production of film, but it also has a less savory connection: to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. Uranium from the Belgian Congo eventually made its way to the Tennessee Eastman plant in Oak Ridge, near Knoxville, where the company’s Y-12 uranium separation plant made the fuel for the atomic bomb. In this dense academic work, Lovejoy, a media and cultural historian at the University of Minnesota, draws attention to this complicated history and describes “how film factories became poison gas and explosives factories.” She describes the way in which film is made, “an admixture of animal hides and bones, trees, cotton, coal, camphor, salts, and silver,” and how Kodak and its main competitor, Germany’s Agfa, produced chemicals not just for film but also for “synthetic fibers, plastic toys, pesticides, artificial flavors, painkillers, and weapons,” with Agfa also becoming “the nerve center for a network of factories, engines for the Third Reich’s military expansion.” Lovejoy documents the frightening similarities between film and poison gas, especially in the days when film was made from the highly flammable cellulose nitrate. For such a short work, this book covers a lot of ground: the development of chemical weapons; the young women who worked at the Y-12 plant and were unaware of the nature of the products being made; and the dangers of radioactive fallout, particles of which traveled from the Nevada testing site to Kodak’s plant in Rochester, N.Y. This is challenging material, but Lovejoy tells the story well, and she adds intimate if sometimes horrifying details, as when she notes that one of the jobs at Y-12 was to pour caustic soda over wood cellulose, a task that gave some women lung injuries that turned into tuberculosis.
A frightening account of film’s supporting role in the development of atomic weaponry.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9780520402935
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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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