Intensive research renders this technological history fascinating even to readers with Luddite tendencies. (14 b&w...
The history of the early 20th-century race between independent young inventor Philo T. Farnsworth and industrialist David Sarnoff to develop and market a functional television system.
A mystery author and Edgar Award–winning biographer of Arthur Conan Doyle (Teller of Tales, 1999), Stashower unearths unexpected human drama from the frantic early days of radio and TV experimentation. He introduces 14-year-old Farnsworth as a scientific prodigy, fascinated by radio and trapped on his family’s Utah farm, who eagerly devoured popular technical journals in an attempt to make up for his lack of formal education. Farnsworth, Stashower argues, saw himself as a 20th-century heir of Thomas Edison’s independence, doggedly refusing to sell the patent rights to the image-replicating system that would eventually take TV to the masses. His main competition was David Sarnoff, the tempestuous head of RCA who built a technological and entertainment empire by buying control of radio-component patents. Stashower traces Sarnoff’s visionary ability to imagine TV’s future potential and in the midst of the Great Depression commit vast resources to its laboratory development. Sarnoff, the author maintains, used his resources to keep Farnsworth tied up in patent court while his research teams scrambled to develop a TV design that could be patented separately. Stashower poignantly reveals Farnsworth’s mental and physical deterioration as he desperately fought off Sarnoff’s corporate and legal attacks. These valiant struggles landed Farnsworth in relative obscurity, where he found solace in fantastic speculations about fusion energy and the knowledge that, despite his business failings, his singular genius revolutionized modern communication.
Intensive research renders this technological history fascinating even to readers with Luddite tendencies. (14 b&w photos and illustrations)Pub Date: April 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0759-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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