by Lee O'Connor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 24, 2014
A brief but thorough examination of a quirky aspect of Cold War America.
O’Connor’s debut history monograph explores Spokane, Washington’s Cold War–era bomb-shelter craze.
Throughout the 1950s, the perceived threat of a Soviet nuclear attack instilled fear across America. Many homeowners responded by making their own bomb shelters, but what started out as a marginal practice became a mainstream craze during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, when President John F. Kennedy endorsed such construction. No city embraced the trend as wholeheartedly as Spokane; later, a local newspaper would describe it as “the first city in the state to have more shelter spaces than population.” Despite its small size, its residents feared that their area would be a prime missile target due to its high concentration of missile sites and U.S. Air Force bases and its relative proximity to the Soviet Union’s eastern border. O’Connor rigorously researches the Spokanites’ paranoia and their desire for physical protection, following this thread from the area’s fortifications during battles with Nez Percé tribesmen in the late 1800s through its makeshift bomb shelters during World War II air-raid drills. The book’s main focus, though, is the aforementioned “fallout shelter mania” of 1961, when hundreds of homeowners and contractors installed concrete bunkers in their backyards. O’Connor uncovers some innovative examples, such as a homeowner-built shelter with a bicycle-powered generator and a passive ventilation system. Other ideas were absurd, such as a government-endorsed plan to build basement shelters out of bookshelves and kiddie pools. This book is a monograph in the truest sense, as the author is almost myopically focused on his subject; he traces the shelters as they shifted to public accessibility in the 1960s and faced neglect and eventual abandonment in the ’70s and ’80s but spares little space for tangential history or analysis. However, he effectively evokes the feeling of the Cold War with three dozen archival images, many from his own collection of bomb shelter–related ephemera. For anyone with an avid interest in this niche subject, these images alone are worth the price of the book.
A brief but thorough examination of a quirky aspect of Cold War America.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496094582
Page Count: 176
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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