by Gregg Herken ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2002
Thoughtful and important.
The dramatic story of physicists who put science at the service of the state, with momentous results for themselves and the world.
Drawing on private papers, personal interviews, and information from recently declassified FBI files, Herken, a curator and historian at the Smithsonian Institution, draws vivid portraits of three scientists whose nuclear research ultimately created the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and the arms race that followed: Berkeley experimentalist and Nobelist Ernest Lawrence, theoretician Robert Oppenheimer, and refugee scientist Edward Teller. Solidly researched, much of Herken’s story reads like a detective story in which the central question—was Robert Oppenheimer, one of the intellectual fathers of the Manhattan Project, once secretly a member of the Communist Party?—remains unanswered. Herken also explains the theoretical debate over whether atomic weapons were feasible and the scientific issues that emerged in developing them, and uses declassified information to describe the USSR’s shockingly successful espionage program against British scientists and the laboratory at Los Alamos. Ultimately, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance after an agonizing hearing in which he admitted lying to federal investigators about possible contacts with the Soviet Union. Both Lawrence and Teller turned against Oppenheimer in the end, though Lawrence declined to testify against him. Yet in Herken’s account, Oppenheimer emerges as a complex, even noble figure who may have lied to save his brother, Frank, a committed Communist. And beyond Oppenheimer’s personal tragedy, Herken shows the broader implications of the Oppenheimer case—the brutal treatment of Oppenheimer, who was widely respected in the scientific community, set back recruitment for nuclear research. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer’s moral opposition to the development of ever-more-potent thermonuclear bombs gave way to an arms race that resulted in the production of over 250,000 nuclear weapons in both the US and USSR over three decades.
Thoughtful and important.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6588-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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