A welcome addition to the literature of the atomic age.
A well considered portrait of the scientists who made the atomic bomb and then repented ever after.
Although thousands of scientists and support staff contributed to the development of the Trinity bomb and its cousins, writes VanDeMark (History/US Naval Academy), nine “contributed centrally to the bomb’s creation” and just as quickly raised objections, on a variety of grounds, to its employment. These scientists, VanDeMark suggests, can be forgiven—if forgiveness is desired—for their initial enthusiasm for the work: after all, caught up in “the frenzy of creation,” they were just doing what scientists do, pursuing knowledge for its own sake; one of them, Edward Teller, argued, “As a scientist, it is my responsibility to make things that will work. How they’re used is not my responsibility.” However, many of Teller’s colleagues disagreed even before the bomb was deployed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some, like Leo Szilard, argued that it should not be used at all, for to do so would “open the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale”; others, like Robert Oppenheimer, maintained that it should be used only at night, when it would light up the night sky and force an immediate surrender in its awful glow. (VanDeMark reveals that the military elected a daylight raid to protect the bomber crews from danger, even if it removed the shock-and-awe element.) Though less well written than Richard Rhodes’s Making of the Atomic Bomb, VanDeMark’s study does a good job of exploring the culture of science, especially the science involved in making weapons and the moral dilemmas such work occasions. As if to validate its subjects’ fears, this closes with a dark warning that the continuing spread of nuclear weapons today puts the lie to previous assurances that the doctrine of deterrence “can work everywhere and forever.”
A welcome addition to the literature of the atomic age.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-73833-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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