A model of academic scrupulousness and popular accessibility.
A concise history of the role that science and technology played during World War II.
In 1942, the triumph of the Allies over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan was anything but a foregone conclusion; in fact, the prospects for victory seemed grim. Feiveson (Unmaking the Bomb, 2014) looks at scientific innovation during the Allied prosecution of the war effort, focusing on different fields of battle: the Battle of Britain; the race for actionable intelligence; the struggle against German U-boats; the challenges of air combat, D-Day, and the invasion of Europe generally; and, of course, the Manhattan project. In each case, the author provides a brief but impressively thorough investigation of the ways in which technological know-how tilted the scales. For example, breakthrough advances in radar were decisive in gaining the upper hand against German U-boats as well as in assuming command of the air. Also, the collaborative decryption of Japanese naval code was integral to victory at the Battle of Midway. Feiveson also takes edifying detours into other significant discoveries—for example, of an anti-malarial other than quinine, which the Japanese monopolized—and the strategic effectiveness and moral defensibility of the Allied bombing campaigns. The gripping narrative that emerges shows that the Germans didn’t have the practical mechanisms in place to efficiently channel their scientific resources into the war effort, while the Allies did. Feiveson was a senior research scientist for the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, and his mastery of the historical material in this work is magisterial. He succinctly and successfully covers a great deal of territory with intellectual rigor and rhetorical transparency. Furthermore, this book serves as a marvelously clear introduction to the war as a whole, including the tumultuous years that preceded it and the uncertain aftermath.
A model of academic scrupulousness and popular accessibility.Pub Date: March 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5478-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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