Fascinating look at how politics and science intersected in the glory years of NASA.
The story of the space race, from an angle only insiders knew until now.
Space journalist Bizony (The Rivers of Mars, 1997) opens with the proposition that Webb, a politically savvy technocrat from North Carolina, deserves the primary credit for NASA's winning the race to put a man on the moon. The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik 1 had set off waves of alarm in Washington circles, which quickly recognized space flight as a key to American power and prestige. Eisenhower, wary of excess military influence on U.S. policy, wanted a civilian agency to oversee the nascent space effort; the result was NASA. Webb, a New Deal Democrat who had served as a budget administrator under Truman, became NASA's director at the beginning of the Kennedy administration. Kennedy promised an American moon landing by the end of the ’60s, and Webb took that promise and ran with it. Bizony details how Webb's personnel decisions, his awarding of contracts and his negotiations with power brokers turned NASA into one of the most prestigious government organizations. Webb believed he was creating a new form of management, and for a long while, his successes made him all but untouchable. Then a fire killed three Apollo astronauts in January 1967. NASA was under the microscope, and the subsequent investigation uncovered enough irregularities to damage Webb’s career. At the same time, the escalation of Vietnam put NASA's budget under new restraints. Webb left the agency in 1968, just before its greatest triumphs. Bizony notes that no subsequent director has come close to Webb’s impact or success. He ends with a scathing look at the agency’s recent years.
Fascinating look at how politics and science intersected in the glory years of NASA.Pub Date: June 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-751-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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 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
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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