Military buffs and would-be submariners will thrill with patriotic pride; others may wonder—as do some of the crew—is this...
A correspondent for Time magazine depicts a US nuclear sub and the demands made on its crew in such detail that the enemy (whoever that might be) could use it for a blueprint.
Waller (Air Warriors, 1998, etc.) patrolled the Atlantic for three months aboard the Trident submarine Nebraska (hence the nickname Big Red) with a crew ready on command to launch nuclear missiles against an unknown enemy. (China? North Korea? Iran?) Although critical details have presumably been omitted, Waller pinpoints even such strategic particulars as the location of the hot keys for a missile launch. Along with specifics of command and control centers are vignettes of the crew, from the captain to the lowliest maintenance man. (There are no women on submarines.) Crew members are locked in this mammoth tube underwater for as long as three months at a time, but life aboard is anything but a waiting game. Constant drills keep the crew on alert; they range from locating a leaking pipe or subduing a (pretend) psychopath to revving up for an actual missile launch, and some require that personnel go for days with little or no sleep. Tensions are relieved with movies, games, practical jokes, food, and a halfway party on the 39th day that features videos from wives and children. Waller also examines the motives and the morale of the men aboard, some driven by patriotism, others by the opportunity to have the Navy pay for a college education or to extend their experience with state-of-the-art technology. Some scenes are delicately moving, as when sonar operators capture the sounds of dolphins playing nearby; others, like the launch drill, capture the pressure and anxiety as the crew prepares—on orders from the commander-in-chief—to push the button.
Military buffs and would-be submariners will thrill with patriotic pride; others may wonder—as do some of the crew—is this trip necessary?Pub Date: March 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019484-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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