An occasionally choppy but intriguing and informative history of laser weapons.
A veteran science and technology writer delivers an insider’s account of the military’s obsession with laser weapons.
First, New Scientist contributor Hecht (Beam: The Race to Make the Laser, 2005, etc.), the author of multiple scholarly books on lasers, delivers an amusing account of fictional death rays from Archimedes to Tesla to Hollywood. All of these are “updated versions of the mythic bolts hurled by mythic ancient gods, born more than a century ago…when scientists were puzzling over new discoveries from X-rays to radio waves, inventors were seeking new weapons of war, and storytellers were looking for thrilling new ways to entertain.” In 1960, a properly stimulated ruby emitted the first tiny laser beam. The author explains that when a light photon stimulates an atom’s electron to jump to a more energetic level and then fall back, it produces an identical photon. With repeated stimulation, massively amplified by mirrors, this light can swell to an intense, narrow beam that carries a great deal of energy. Of course, LASER is an acronym: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. A torrent of civilian applications followed the initial discovery, and the military began to pay attention. Hecht reminds readers that, struck by a laser beam, a target does not conveniently explode but rather gets hotter. Industrial lasers burn holes in metal held immobile a few inches away. Generating a beam capable of hitting, following, and destroying a speeding rocket hundreds of miles distant seems wacky, but readers may recall that this was the “Star Wars” anti-missile system launched by Ronald Reagan in 1983 and officially abandoned in 1993. All was not lost, however. Wildly expensive research produced technical advances, and lasers continue to grow more powerful, efficient, and compact. Now in field testing, powerful beams have destroyed small boats, shot down drones, and punched holes in vehicles.
An occasionally choppy but intriguing and informative history of laser weapons.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63388-460-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A feast for students of ancient history and budding historians of any period.
A delightful new translation of what is widely considered the first work of history and nonfiction.
Herodotus has a wonderful, gossipy style that makes reading these histories more fun than studying the rise of the Persian Empire and its clash with Greece—however, that’s exactly what readers will do in this engaging history, which is full of interesting digressions and asides. Holland (In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, 2012, etc.), whose lifelong devotion to Herodotus, Thucydides and other classical writers is unquestionable, provides an engaging modern translation. As Holland writes, Herodotus’ “great work is many things—the first example of nonfiction, the text that underlies the entire discipline of history, the most important source of information we have for a vital episode in human affairs—but it is above all a treasure-trove of wonders.” Those just being introduced to the Father of History will agree with the translator’s note that this is “the greatest shaggy-dog story ever written.” Herodotus set out to explore the causes of the Greco-Persian Wars and to explore the inability of East and West to live together. This is as much a world geography and ethnic history as anything else, and Herodotus enumerates social, religious and cultural habits of the vast (known) world, right down to the three mummification options available to Egyptians. This ancient Greek historian could easily be called the father of humor, as well; he irreverently describes events, players and their countless harebrained schemes. Especially enjoyable are his descriptions of the Persians making significant decisions under the influence and then waiting to vote again when sober. The gifts Herodotus gave history are the importance of identifying multiple sources and examining differing views.
A feast for students of ancient history and budding historians of any period.Pub Date: May 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02489-6
Page Count: 840
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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