A well-crafted combination of technology history, tortuous military politics, and the biography of a shamefully neglected...
A history of the attack submarine and its inventor, who “would never know that he had helped create one of the defining killing machines of two world wars.”
Historians pay great attention to humankind’s yearning to fly. The desire to travel underwater turns out to be equally fascinating, with many difficult technical barriers and a fiercely single-minded inventor, John Philip Holland (1841-1914), who is now mostly forgotten. The story is well-told by historian and journalist Goldstone (Drive: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age, 2016). Holland arrived from Ireland in 1873, already fascinated by submarines. Faced with an indifferent U.S. Navy, he struggled for more than two decades to obtain financing. No sooner had he succeeded when Navy “experts” demanded changes that converted his plans to a lugubrious Rube Goldberg–esque contraption. Holland essentially abandoned it and built the submarine he had designed. Tested in 1898, it thrilled observers, including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, who urged superiors to buy the machine. They refused. His money exhausted, Holland had no choice but to accept the offer of a rescuer, Isaac Rice, wealthy owner of many businesses, including some that supplied Holland. In exchange for financial aid, Holland turned over his patents and control of the company. Rice had no interest in sharing power, and Holland resigned after several frustrating years. Litigation prevented him from starting a rival company, and his death after 10 years of retirement went unnoticed. Rice’s capital and connections worked their magic on the Navy, which bought its first submarine, the USS Holland, in 1900 but remained lukewarm about buying more. Rice eventually struck it rich but not until World War I broke out.
A well-crafted combination of technology history, tortuous military politics, and the biography of a shamefully neglected American inventor.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-429-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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