An important account of nuclear hubris and its incompletely tallied costs.
When the U.S. “rehearsed global suicide” in the desert.
Spanning nearly 100 years, starting before physicist Leo Szilard’s 1933 vision of a split nucleus, this history by documentary filmmaker Else covers the A-bomb’s invention, use, testing, and extravagant stockpiling—while saluting the frighteningly limited, stalwart number of people who strove to assure our survival by disarmament and treaties. Code-named “Priscilla,” a 1957 37-kiloton test on the Frenchman Flat—“deep in the badlands of Nevada”—provides the thread for this tale of planetary-scale risk-taking. “With its smashed aircraft hangars, rusting blast doors, and pigpens,” Else observes, the test site “resembles a silent, sun-bleached boneyard from the movie Planet of the Apes.” Nothing lands like the story’s central irony: Nuclear caches threatened civilization in order to save it, betting on deterrence via “parity of terror” or “demonic circularity.” In the hot-potato partnership between science and politics, staggering spending and stringent secrecy prevail, while environmental and human costs are unreckoned or elided. Else’s writing is detailed but never dry. Vivid metaphors give the narrative propulsive force: A steel safe, alone amid test rubble, is “a squat cookie jar from Hell”; nuclear bomb-making physics is “the espresso of science: an essence concentrated under pressure”; unscathed Hiroshima was “a china shop awaiting the bull.” Jaw-dropping statistics shake readers: Before 1963, “We had blown the equivalent of 29,000 Hiroshima bombs into the air”; “In the 1950s the US shot off one nuclear explosion in the atmosphere on average every three weeks, occasionally two in the same day.” The author evenhandedly reports the moral and ethical questions about the bomb and the start of the arms race, acknowledging doubts that tests were even scientifically or militarily justified as data producers. Colloquial expression, compelling description, first-person reporting, and direct address help rivet the reader. Present-day relevance makes this message urgent. As treaties end, and the U.S. begins an extended nuclear upgrade, writes Else, “a visit to Frenchman Flat should be a requirement for holding public office in America.”
An important account of nuclear hubris and its incompletely tallied costs.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9780674300354
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: today
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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 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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