An entertaining account of research that solved a historical mystery.
Surprising new facts about the first submarine to destroy an enemy ship.
The culmination of years of development by Confederate designers led by marine engineer Horace Lawson Hunley, the Hunley killed two crew teams during testing (Hunley was among those killed) and a third on February 17, 1864, when it sank a Union blockader in Charleston Harbor with a bomb at the end of a 20-foot pole. Ironically, since submerging had proved a death sentence, the submarine traveled on the surface during its successful attack. This dramatic feat gained it mythical status, and great excitement followed the exhumation of the wreck in 2000. An engineer working for the Navy, Lance was studying at Duke University for a doctorate in biomedical engineering, and her thesis research concerned the effect of underwater explosions on humans. Most occurred during World War II, so these occupied her until a thesis advisor suggested that she give thought to the Hunley. She complied and turned up an intriguing puzzle, which she delivers to readers. When recovered, the submarine was intact with little visible damage. “All eight men inside were found resting at their battle stations,” she writes. “None showed any signs of skeletal trauma. None appeared to have made any attempt to escape the vessel. The narrative combines description of the author’s research into what happened after the explosion with a detailed history of events on that night in 1864, including biographies of those involved and careful examinations of the eight victims. In Hollywood, an explosion hurls the hero through the air; he brushes himself off and walks away. In reality, most bomb blasts mutilate their targets, but a sufficiently strong shock wave can produce internal injuries that kill someone on the spot. Lance delivers a lively, if often technical, description of the many experiments, models, calculations, and explosions that persuaded her and her doctoral committee that this is what happened to the Hunley.
An entertaining account of research that solved a historical mystery.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4415-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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