Ultra was the high-grade intelligence made available to the Allies throughout WW II, thanks to the UK's ability to read many of the Wehrmacht's Enigma ciphers. Messages sent via Kriegsmarine systems, however, were appreciably tougher to decode than those from Enigma machines employed by other branches of the Nazi military. As one result, Hitler's U-boats took a heavy toll on merchant shipping, threatening Great Britain's high-seas lifeline during the early years of the war. Newsday editor Kahn (Kahn on Codes, 1983) offers a wide-ranging appreciation of how the Royal Navy furnished the Oxbridge dons and other boffins posted to England's Bletchley Park the material they needed to decipher submarine signals. In brief, the high command authorized a series of attacks on German weather vessels gathering climatic data offshore Iceland. These forays, plus the fortuitous capture of several U-boats, paid off in up-to-the-minute rundowns on code-wheel settings, which allowed cryptanalysts to read tactical communiquÇs almost as quickly as sub captains. Consequently, the Admiralty was able to route convoys away from wolfpacks, saving untold numbers of vessels and keeping desperately needed supplies moving from North America to the island nation. Among other fresh perspectives, Kahn provides detailed, action-packed accounts (drawn from interviews with surviving eyewitnesses on both sides) of the bold seizures that yielded vital documents. Covered as well are the contributions of Polish mathematicians to unriddling Enigma transmissions, code-breaking successes by the Axis, German countermeasures, and the intricacies of convoy management. The author is as pains to stress that Ultra intelligence, while important for helping to save blood and treasure, was not decisive in the battle of the Atlantic. As the conflict intensified, he concludes, Anglo-American forces gained an unbeatable edge in technology and firepower; their shipyards, moreover, produced replacement bottoms at a pace faster than U- boats could sink operational fleets. A first-rate briefing on the use of brawn as well as brains to alleviate the U-boat threat.
Pub Date: April 17, 1991
ISBN: 0-395-42739-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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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