A hard-edged history of a center of Cold War death-dealing technology. Ackland, a former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and now a professor of journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder, offers a history of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility just a few miles south of Boulder. The plant was carved from a vast cattle ranch thanks to the efforts of hawkish Senator Edwin Johnson, who, Ackland writes, “embodied the peculiar relationship Westerners had developed with the federal government,” a relationship that mixed a kind of state socialism with myths of rugged individualism. The Rocky Flats facility went on to process staggering quantities of strontium, uranium, and plutonium, materials that periodically posed a threat to public health in the Denver area—especially after catastrophic 1957 and 1969 fires, the second of which foreshadowed the disastrous Chernobyl meltdown 17 years later. Both fires were controlled. Local newspapers generally ignored the first, “muted,” Ackland says, “by the aura of national security surrounding the plant.” But the second came under more critical scrutiny, and the facility thereafter became a centerpiece of antinuclear activism in the West. More than offering a history of the plant alone, Ackland also serves up a useful summary of American nuclear policy in the Cold War era, noting that in 1948 the military petitioned President Truman for custody of the nation’s nuclear-weapons program, including Rocky Flats. Truman refused, saying of the atomic bomb, “You have to understand that this isn—t a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.” The scary workings of Rocky Flats were far from ordinary. So, too, is this fine book of reportage and history.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8263-1877-0
Page Count: 296
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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