A splendid distillation of nuclear history, and just the thing for students of the modern age.
Did we ever learn to love the bomb? Perhaps not, this opinionated and lively history shows.
Historian DeGroot (Modern History/Univ. of St. Andrews) opens, fittingly, with a funeral, a “row of tiny coffins” commemorating the deaths of eighteen small children killed by a German Gotha bomber. The children weren’t meant to be sacrificed, of course, but the German bomb had been dropped on London in 1917 with the intent of killing someone, and whether civilian or military didn’t much matter. Fast-forward to Hiroshima, with the same effect: “The Americans didn’t intend to hit a hospital, but they did intend to kill people.” So it was with the postwar bomb: the world knew that civilian, child, innocent, and suchlike categories no longer mattered, and if the bomb was not going to adjust for us, we were going to have to adjust for the bomb. DeGroot writes with a smartly revisionist, sometimes acid sensibility: Werner Heisenberg may have protested that he worked for the Nazis only unwillingly, but if “he only pretended to collaborate, he did so with great enthusiasm.” Albert Einstein was a poster boy for the bomb, but the real engine behind it was Leo Szilard. Ironically enough, Japan had a nuclear-weapons program of its own; after Hiroshima, the General Staff told the nation’s leading atomic scientist that the military would try to hold out for six months if he could build a bomb to use against the Americans in that amount of time. Nagasaki was an accident, the victim of a too-stiff Japanese resistance over the intended target. In the postwar era, Britain pushed to develop a bomb because it was cheaper than maintaining a massive army, a cousin of thought to Robert McNamara’s theory of peace through mutually assured destruction. And so on over seven decades, in a narrative characterized by an odd amiability and even hopefulness—even though, as DeGroot notes, the shadow of the bomb falls on us still.
A splendid distillation of nuclear history, and just the thing for students of the modern age.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-674-01724-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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 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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