A riveting addition to the literature on scientific innovation during the Second World War.
An engineer hails a lesser-known technological breakthrough of the World War II era.
The United States’ weaponization of nuclear technology and England’s cracking of the Enigma code are often discussed in conversations about the roles of scientists and mathematicians in the Second World War. However, this book suggests that “one small piece of hardware” may have been “the single most important physical invention” that ended the war in Europe. The resonant cavity magnetron paved the way for microwave radar systems that gave Allies a distinct advantage over Nazi Germany. The difference between the radar used during the early years of the war and this new version, the book notes, “was akin to that between the musket and the rifle.” The author convincingly suggests that microwave radar’s abilities to detect U-boats and to give bombers the ability to “see” through overcast skies were essential prerequisites to the successful D-Day campaign. Indeed, the book notes that microwave-enabled bombing campaigns on Nazi factories and infrastructure essentially disabled Germany’s air force before a single Allied soldier stepped foot on the beaches of Normandy. Some academic historians may balk at the author’s overreliance on a handful of secondary sources for historical context, and cynics may question the book’s hagiographic tendencies. However, as a retired electronics engineer who helped design radar equipment used in air traffic control towers, Fine expertly breaks down the complex technology and deftly guides readers through myriad acronyms used by the military and government agencies. The book also tells a compelling story of how a network of “unlikely partners”—including politicians, businessmen, army generals, and university presidents—transformed what was previously a “hazy dream to a few scientists” into a deployable tool. Original interviews with those who made and used the tech, including project engineers and B-17 navigators, complement the narrative, as do ample photographs and illustrations.
A riveting addition to the literature on scientific innovation during the Second World War.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64-012220-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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