Recovers for a new generation the thrill of a pioneer quest and the spirit of an age that already seems like ancient history.
A genial look at the earliest days of the space race.
With the 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first man-made object to orbit the earth, the Soviet Union delivered arguably the most severe psychological blow of the Cold War. Keeping other failed attempts quiet, the Russians quickly followed up this propaganda victory with two more satellites, one carrying the camera-friendly dog Laika. With a light and companionable touch, Pulitzer Prize–winner D’Antonio (Hershey: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams, 2006, etc.) examines a shaken America’s answer to this challenge. Predictably, ambitious politicians criticized Eisenhower for allowing America to lag. Competitive military services squabbled among themselves while U.S. scientists went quietly to work. Chief among them were dogged James Van Allen, discoverer of radiation belts surrounding the globe; intense Nicholas Christofilos, responsible for the first big experiment in space, albeit one requiring the detonation of atomic bombs; and brilliant Wernher von Braun, the erstwhile German rocketeer so indispensable that the government quietly airbrushed his Nazi past. (For more on this, see Michael J. Neufeld’s Von Braun, 2007.) The story’s charm, however, lies in D’Antonio’s evocation of the average American’s response to the dawning space age, which makes a nice contrast to Matthew Brzezinski’s big-man approach in Red Moon Rising (2007). The public evinced a mixture of dread—it’s no accident that this period brought a rash of UFO sightings—and excitement that ranged from the provincial boosterism of rocket-building Huntsville, Ala., to the wide-open, boomtown atmosphere of Cocoa Beach and rocket-firing Cape Canaveral, Fla. Within two years America caught up, launching four satellites and one monkey named Gordo. Ahead lay the formation of NASA, the beginning of the manned space program and momentous triumphs almost obliterating the fumbled beginning, when the failure of a Vanguard rocket launch allowed critics to cry, “Flopnik.”
Recovers for a new generation the thrill of a pioneer quest and the spirit of an age that already seems like ancient history.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9431-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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