For students of technological history and political wrangling alike, the book is endlessly interesting and full of...
They may soon be delivering this book to you, but for now, writes Woodrow Wilson Center global fellow Whittle in this follow-up to his excellent The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey (2010), drones are anything but your friends.
Put a laser, a cannon and some Hellfire missiles into an unmanned aircraft, and you have a potent killing machine. The impulse to create the unmanned drone came from an Israeli lab in response to a quite specific problem: namely, Soviet rockets with multistage radars aimed at Israeli jets by Syrian and Egyptian fighters. The emergent need for a decoy aircraft that would look just like a full-scale jet to radar surveillance prompted inventor Abraham Karem to come up with an even better solution. Fast-forward four decades, and the drone has become commonplace, increasingly used by American forces after 9/11. Getting there is the subject of Whittle’s narrative, which soon lands on a second big problem—that unmanned aircraft are inherently less safe than piloted ones. In between, the author looks at the machinations of defense industry contractors and military procurement specialists to get the latest and greatest (and, it seems, most expensive) hardware into the air. There’s plenty of geekery befitting a Tom Clancy novel to keep readers entertained, with Whittle occasionally sliding into jargon-y prose: “After takeoff, the pilot was to fly the Predator to mission altitude, where a technician would bore-sight the MTS ball; next the pilot would put the Predator into an orbit, at which point the mission crew at the GCS at CIA headquarters would take control using the Ku-band satellite link.” Such longueurs aside, Whittle’s account comes to a pointed conclusion: Drone technology has already changed how we die, but what remains to be seen is how it “may change the way people live.”
For students of technological history and political wrangling alike, the book is endlessly interesting and full of implication.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9964-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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