An engaging yet disquieting portrait of postwar America through the eyes of a pair of brothers who accomplished great things...
In this meticulously researched dual biography of scientist Bernard Vonnegut (1914-1997) and his brother, fiction writer Kurt (1922-2007), Orion contributing editor Strand (Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, 2012, etc.) focuses on the late 1940s to the early 1950s, when the brothers both worked at General Electric.
“Progress is our most important product,” the company proclaimed, a motto that both Vonneguts came to question. In 1942, Bernie moved from MIT’s meteorology department to the famed GE Research Laboratory, where scientists found the kind of free-ranging opportunities that later would define Silicon Valley: ample time and resources to explore and experiment. There, Bernie joined the team of Project Cirrus, investigating the possibility of “man-controlled weather,” specifically, cloud seeding to produce rain. Kurt, who had been a prisoner of war and witness to the bombing of Dresden, was intent on writing short stories. But in 1945, with a wife and young child to support, he joined GE’s public relations department, “churning out peppy overviews” of GE’s innovations while, at the same time, satirizing the company in short stories that, to his dismay, were repeatedly rejected. Strand closely examines both brothers’ careers in the context of postwar euphoria: science and technology were exalted as paths to a “brave new world,” and the nation flaunted its military and economic might. Optimistic about America’s future when they first joined GE, the brothers became increasingly pessimistic due to the Korean War, the heating up of the arms race, and Cold War politics. When Bernie realized that manipulating weather was seen as a potential weapon, he pressed for government oversight, despite much popular opposition to “planning” and “regulation.” Strand’s thoughtful history, drawn from abundant archival sources, recounts the brothers’ repeated frustrations and disillusion as they confronted, in their own ways, the unsettling ethical questions of their time.
An engaging yet disquieting portrait of postwar America through the eyes of a pair of brothers who accomplished great things in different fields.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-11701-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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