Good stuff for those interested in cryptography and WWII-era military intelligence.
A hitherto unwritten chapter in WWII history, in which the worlds of cloak and dagger and geekdom collide.
Most of the extensive literature surrounding the decipherment of the German navy’s Enigma code centers on Bletchley Park and the British contribution. When German cryptographers added a fourth rotor to Enigma in 1942, write journalist/mystery novelist DeBrosse (Southern Cross, 1994, etc.) and Burke (History/Univ. of Maryland), they created a coding system that they were sure was unbreakable: “Theoretically, at least, the number of ciphering possibilities generated by the advanced naval Enigma of 1942 was far greater than the number of all the atoms in the observable universe.” The capture of several Enigma machines at sea—the British navy made it a point to seek out German weather ships just for the purpose—and the deconstruction of their complex wiring reduced the number of possibilities, but not enough. Enter the good folks at the National Cash Register Corporation of Dayton, Ohio, newly put to work for the Allied war effort, and NCR’s head of electrical research, Joseph Desch, “a devout Catholic, a heavy after-hours drinker and a chain-smoker considerate enough to confine his habit to his own office.” The British were at first reluctant to share data with the Americans, but in time they admitted Desch and company as junior partners in the Enigma-cracking enterprise, and with a little help from the legendarily eccentric British physicist Alan Turing, the NCR staff eventually developed a machine capable of deciphering encoded German naval communications. Surprisingly, the Germans never caught on, even though a disgruntled NCR employee, one of those classic loners, did his best to leak information to Axis agents. More surprisingly, the NCR folks honored their pledge to secrecy long after the war, and only recently has any documentary evidence been available to historians.
Good stuff for those interested in cryptography and WWII-era military intelligence.Pub Date: April 27, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50807-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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 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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
