Despite a few faults, an interesting and informative story.
Exhaustively researched, reader-friendly narrative of the telecom industry.
Lundy, a faculty member of the computer-science department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., for more than 20 years, covers the telecom industry’s history with admirable enthusiasm and knowledge, starting with the first simple communication devices and continuing through developments in the phone and radio industries. The author is at his best when he focuses on stories about the historical figures behind the technological development. It’s hard to imagine a more thorough account of the progression from the first telegraph to the work of Samuel Morse and Cyrus Field, with an enlightening look at supporting players like Fog Smith and Henry O’Reilly. Similarly, he tells the story of the telephone through the stories of the well-known principals, like Alexander Graham Bell, and important but underappreciated contributors like Johann Philipp Reis and Walter S. Gifford. Lundy takes into account how technological developments worked together–how laying a transatlantic cable efficiently in terms of cost and work was greatly enhanced by the development of a boat large enough to carry tons of telegraph cable. He also explains most technical concepts where the story depends on them. However, the book suffers from a slightly rough beginning. Lundy’s primer on economics in the introduction could have been cut completely, and he often indulges in a bit of editorializing, especially in the ending chapter, where he opines about free-market development and the often-negative role he sees governments playing in the advance of technology. Some of these conclusions are touched on in the chapters, but would be better left for the reader to decipher. At times, it also reads like a lecture, repeating information from previous sections or using phrases like “as will be seen later” that take up space without advancing the story. Lundy could have easily cut 100 pages and still delivered a taut but detailed narrative.
Despite a few faults, an interesting and informative story.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-1308-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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 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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