A key figure in the annals of aviation technology, Johnson well merits this detail-packed life.
An engaging life of an inventor and aviation pioneer with an astonishing, if little-known, roster of accomplishments.
Kelly Johnson rarely sought publicity for himself, and, though not shy of accepting awards—his favorite being a Daniel Guggenheim medal “because it was for art and design”—he wasn’t a self-promoter. Yet, writes journalist Dean, no fewer than 40 aircraft had their origins on Johnson’s drawing board. Born at the dawn of aviation, Johnson was an ardent reader of books about science and engineering, bent, as he later put it, on being “like Tom Swift.” Later, he took on the works of Albert Einstein, intending to be one of the first people to understand them. Those around him recognized both Johnson’s genius and drivenness, including a flight instructor refusing to take money for instruction and instead telling Johnson to spend the fee on college. Johnson then went to California to take a job with the firm the brothers Loughead, later simplified to Lockheed, founded before going bankrupt. He started in the reborn company as “an eighty-three-dollar-per-month tool designer,” though, as Dean notes, Johnson and his colleagues were “Swiss Army knives” who could do anything. In time, Johnson led the “Skunk Works,” becoming an adept at new technologies—such as the wind tunnel and, in his spare time, streamlining a car that would win the Indy 500. He also came into the orbit of the aviation heroes of the time, among them Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post. Johnson’s Lockheed came into its own in World War II, with him designing a range of warplanes. After the war ended, the company was bound up with the defense industry, although Johnson tried constantly to defeat the bureaucracy while coming up with things, like the U-2 spy plane and the stealth bomber.
A key figure in the annals of aviation technology, Johnson well merits this detail-packed life.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781524745516
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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 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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