Among books dealing with seemingly impossible engineering feats, this easily ranks with David McCullough’s The Great Bridge...
A Washington Post military reporter brilliantly charts the conception, creation and history of the Pentagon, an architectural “monstrosity.”
Throughout his seamless narrative, Vogel weaves many fascinating tales, about the Potomac riverside site eventually chosen for the Pentagon; the aesthetic and political battles that accompanied construction; the building’s 1941 racial integration and the still incomplete project to fully unify the armed forces; the grinding down of Secretaries of Defense from Forrestal to McNamara to Rumsfeld; the 1967 anti-war march that resulted in “The Battle of the Pentagon”; the bombing by the Weather Underground in 1972; and the catastrophic 2001 terrorist attack. Principally, however, he features the heroic project of constructing, then reconstructing, the mammoth building conceived as only temporary headquarters for the War Department. With Hitler unleashed in Europe, the Pentagon, planned for efficiency, not beauty, went up with astonishing speed thanks to the hard-driving General Brehon Somervell, whose indispensability during World War II now seems largely forgotten; his virtual clone as a taskmaster, General Leslie Groves, whose relentlessness later made him the perfect head of the Manhattan Project; and contractor John McShain, whose thirst for glory had already induced him to build most of 1930’s official Washington, including the Jefferson Memorial. Working under Chief of Staff George Marshall, who would occasionally inspect the project from horseback, and enduring the meddling of FDR, who fancied himself an amateur architect, these men accomplished an engineering marvel and left a legacy almost perfectly matched decades later by the quietly efficient Lee Evey and the brilliantly profane structural engineer, Allyn Kilsheimer, who ran the Phoenix Project, the swift resurrection of the Pentagon following 9/11.
Among books dealing with seemingly impossible engineering feats, this easily ranks with David McCullough’s The Great Bridge and The Path Between the Seas, as well as Ross King’s Brunelleschi’s Dome.Pub Date: June 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6303-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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