by Michael J. Neufeld ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 2007
Densely packed with political and technical detail, but nonetheless engrossing: the defining work on a still-controversial...
Judicious biography of the Nazis’ chief rocket designer, who went on to lead the U.S. space program.
Son of a wealthy Prussian aristocrat, Werner Von Braun (1912–77) became fascinated with space travel during adolescence. His experiments with rockets while still an engineering student intrigued the German army, which hired him in 1932. Hitler’s 1933 accession opened the money floodgates, and Von Braun soon directed hundreds of workers in a top-secret complex. One result was the V-2, a dazzling achievement that killed thousands when launched against the Allies, in addition to the thousands of slave laborers who died while manufacturing the rocket under brutal conditions. Historian Neufeld (The Bombing of Auschwitz, 2000, etc.) agrees with critics who accuse Von Braun of complicity in Nazi crimes, noting that his obsession with space trumped any moral feelings. Brought to America with most of his team in 1945, the scientist energetically advocated space travel to a huge audience reached through books and a famous Colliers magazine series brought to television by Walt Disney. After the trauma of Sputnik’s launch in October 1957 and the embarrassing launch-pad explosion of the Vanguard TV-3 in December, Von Braun became a national hero and a media icon on January 31, 1958, when the first American satellite was successfully put into orbit. President Kennedy’s 1961 announcement of the Apollo program was the culmination of the scientist’s dreams. Despite receiving the lion’s share of publicity, his role was limited to designing the huge Saturn rocket, but this was the primary technological hurdle, and Saturn remains the only large booster that never failed. Neufeld stresses that Von Braun was less a brilliant innovator than a skilled leader of other brilliant men, much like the Manhattan Project’s J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Densely packed with political and technical detail, but nonetheless engrossing: the defining work on a still-controversial figure.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-26292-9
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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edited by Michael J. Neufeld & Michael Berenbaum
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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