Useful reading for students of Cold War history and modern technology.
A memoir of a life spent developing a high-tech silent service.
Craven, the descendant of a long line of naval officers, saw service as a seaman during WWII, in the course of which he developed the conviction that the only way for the US to avoid future bloodshed was to become the undisputed toughest kid on the block. As Chief Scientist of the Navy’s Special Projects Office from 1958 to 1970, he had plenty of opportunity to develop weaponry that gave the enemy (in his time, the Soviet Union) pause—notably the Polaris missile system (which, he hints, kept the Cuban Missile Crisis from boiling over into full-out war). As he discusses the baffling array of death-dealing technology that emerged from his office, Craven sometimes forgets that his audience may not share his expertise, but no matter; fans of Tom Clancy (whose Hunt for Red October was inspired by real-life events in which Craven took part) will get a charge out of his adventures all the same, especially when reading his often funny sketches of the Soviet spies who followed him around. At the dramatic heart of his story lies a little-known episode in Cold War history: An American long-range bomber collided with a refueling plane over Spain and dropped its payload of nuclear weaponry on and near a small fishing village. Craven’s account of the delicate salvage operation (which ended happily and made a fortune for a fisherman who helped locate one of the bombs out at sea) develops with nicely rendered tension. His prose is a little ham-fisted, but he makes up for it with ample anecdotes about the strange internal politics of the military-industrial complex—and he even explains why government-issue toilet seats cost so much.
Useful reading for students of Cold War history and modern technology.Pub Date: April 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87213-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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
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