While WS-117L was not entirely successful, Dienesch asserts in this solid, specialized scholarly study, it laid the...
A study of how the Dwight Eisenhower administration created the first U.S. satellite reconnaissance mission.
The desperate need for better intelligence of Soviet strategic capacities plagued the post–World War II presidencies of Harry Truman and Eisenhower, gaining special urgency in the wake of the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957. Canadian historian Dienesch (Univ. of Windsor, Ontario) examines how the shock and terror that the orbiting of the Sputnik satellite instilled in the American public and the Eisenhower administration proved the catalyst for the implementation of the American reconnaissance satellite program, which was up and running only 34 months after the Russian’s launch. The WS-117L program, the precursor to the more successful Corona satellites, was the prototype, engineered during the early years of the Eisenhower administration by the U.S. Air Force and cloaked in secrecy. Dienesch asserts that very little has been written about this precursor, dwarfed by research on the later Corona program, which the CIA took over from the Air Force. To understand the later triumphs, the author steps back to look at Eisenhower’s initial motivation. The threefold challenges Eisenhower faced were to protect the U.S. from Soviet aggression, to establish economic security (the economy was besieged by the huge increase needed for defense spending to combat this threat), and to withstand the pressure from the military, which was whipping itself into a state of overmilitarization. Deterrence and containment were the new watchwords, and a satellite that would monitor the Soviet Union was the answer. The author looks at the RAND development of the satellite from 1945 to 1954 and how the satellite was supposed to retrieve film, though it suffered from management and other problems and was retired by the end of Eisenhower’s second term, replaced by Corona.
While WS-117L was not entirely successful, Dienesch asserts in this solid, specialized scholarly study, it laid the foundation for the U.S. space effort for the next 40 years.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8032-5572-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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