A carefully documented life story, though Lindorff’s contention that Hall “saved the world” may strike readers as overstated.
Biography of a physicist who spied for the Soviet Union and was never arrested.
Ted Hall (1925-1999) was a prodigy, admitted to Harvard to study physics at 16 and recruited for the Manhattan Project in 1944 at 18. Investigative journalist Lindorff reminds readers that at this time, the Soviets and Americans were allies. American media extolled the heroics of the Red Army, which suffered enormously and fought stubbornly during the Nazi invasion, and portrayed Stalin as a benign leader. Although never a communist, writes the author, Hall believed “that the United States, with a monopoly on the atomic bomb, would pose a dire threat to the other nations of the world. His fear that the United States would use its devastating power to dominate the globe unless prevented by another nation with a similar weapon was not misplaced.” As a spy, historians agree, Hall delivered technical plans for a bomb identical to the one the Soviets tested in 1949. A suspicious FBI investigated him for years but stopped, Lindorff theorizes, on orders from the Air Force because revealing Hall’s espionage would force it to fire his brother, the “director of the entire USAF ballistic missile development program.” Hall’s espionage did not become public knowledge until 1995. Lindorff concludes the book with highly unflattering views of postwar America, including the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s. He maintains that the U.S. planned a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union before it could develop its own bomb, but was foiled when the Soviets succeeded with their project so quickly. “It’s likely,” he writes, “that Ted Hall’s spying effort did prevent the nightmare of a U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons and a genocidal nuclear attack against the Soviet people in the early 1950s.”
A carefully documented life story, though Lindorff’s contention that Hall “saved the world” may strike readers as overstated.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781633888951
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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 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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