A well-written, provocative account that could alter our views of both Hoover and Einstein.
Technology Review columnist Jerome turns a brief newspaper reference he saw by chance into a fascinating account of the world-famous scientist’s harassment by the FBI.
Dozens of previous books have documented Hoover's surveillance of public figures, especially those he considered disloyal to his nation. But Albert Einstein, the genius physicist? Researching a project on the most prominent science stories of the 20th century, Jerome tracked references to Einstein published after his death in 1955. On page 17 of the New York Times business section for Sept. 9, 1983, he came across the headline “FBI Filed Reports on Einstein as a Spy and Kidnap Plotter.” Interested and puzzled, he used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the FBI’s file on Einstein. What he found in those documents was the story not of Einstein the scientist, but of Einstein the crusader for civil rights on behalf of blacks, victims of anti-Communist witch-hunts, and other persecuted individuals. Although this is decidedly not a full biography of Einstein (the author counts at least 300 of those already), the monograph provides considerable enlightenment about aspects of his life apart from what the FBI recorded. The Bureau’s files, not so incidentally, are filled with rumor and factual inaccuracies galore; the supposedly crackerjack law-enforcement agency comes across here as a den of law-breaking buffoons. Jerome suggests that Hoover and his agents cared less about truthfulness than about silencing celebrities who had left-wing ideas and intimidating the remaining population. Einstein emerges as a hero, refusing to let the federal government's underhanded tactics discourage his support of unpopular causes.
A well-written, provocative account that could alter our views of both Hoover and Einstein.Pub Date: May 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28856-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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 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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