A singular event captured in ordinary—and extraordinary—images.
Chronicling the first atomic blast.
The great mushroom cloud of an atomic or hydrogen bomb detonation has been called “a thing of terrible beauty.” Indeed, at its most dramatic, Seyl’s illustrated history of the inaugural atomic bomb test, and beyond, possesses a hypnotic, terrifying majesty. The experience of reading this book is both admiring and unsettling. The Manhattan Project, which produced the world’s first atomic bomb and hastened the end of World War II, was not without its doubters. Those, like project leaders J. Robert Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie R. Groves, whose absolute commitment to the success of the first test, codenamed “Trinity,” was, in the aftermath, matched by their disquiet at what it portended. Seyl, a science writer and editor at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s National Security Research Center, headed an editorial and photographic team that lends context to these never-before-seen photographs. Some, only recently declassified, provide a close-up, on-the-ground sense of the unique challenges faced, the exhaustive preparations for a highly complex and novel procedure, and the testing in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto (“Journey of the Dead Man”) region, with scientists and military personnel working in the relentless heat of the desert sun. The dual detonations over Japan in 1945 famously inspired Oppenheimer to quote, ruefully, an ancient Hindu text: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Although the firsthand accounts are compelling, some of the details about the photography itself and images of the many cameras and measuring instruments employed to capture the first detonation may be of more interest to professionals than to the general reader. But these are quibbles.
A singular event captured in ordinary—and extraordinary—images.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780226848402
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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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