A marvelous history, full of color, drama, conflict, and tragedy. Besides being a terrific read, it illustrates one often...
Secret codes are as old as writing, but the science of codebreaking remained a minor field until the invention of the telegraph and radio made rapid communication easy, essential—and public.
This story has been told before, but science journalist Budiansky (Nature’s Keepers, 1995) tells it best. He has read the archives, interviewed participants, and seen newly declassified files. He begins in England. Capitalizing on their reputation (in Germany) for stupidity, the British assembled the world’s best codebreakers during WWI, routinely reading Germany’s diplomatic and naval traffic. In moments of leisure, they perused American communications, which were laughably crude (Woodrow Wilson coded and decoded his own messages). By the late 1930s, however, the US had reached parity with the British, and we could read Japanese diplomatic traffic—which was useful, but not useful enough to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor. Burned once, the Germans developed the famous Enigma machine, which created a cipher so complex that British and French experts were stumped. They were flabbergasted when the Polish secret service showed them one. It was not stolen; a Polish mathematician had recreated it from its pattern of transmissions, the first of many brilliant codebreaking coups that enabled the Allies to read large portions of enemy communications. Barely six months after Pearl Harbor, outnumbered US forces won a smashing victory at the Battle of Midway only because they knew every detail of the Japanese plan. The German naval command wondered why Allied convoys often sailed around waiting submarine wolf packs but remained confident its transmissions were secure. The codebreakers themselves were a collection of dogged obsessives, eccentrics, and mathematical geniuses who might work years to solve a single problem. The geniuses who worked on the Manhattan Project had easier problems because everyone knew an atom bomb would work. No one knew if a code was breakable until it was broken.
A marvelous history, full of color, drama, conflict, and tragedy. Besides being a terrific read, it illustrates one often overlooked reason why the Allieds won the war: they were smarter.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85932-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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