Cliché-filled take on a compelling story.
Romance, intrigue and science converge in an interesting though blandly told tale of the first fatal nuclear accident in the United States.
Three people were killed when a military test reactor exploded on Jan. 3, 1961, in Idaho’s Lost River Desert. Through extensive archival research and interviews, Tucker (The Great Starvation Experiment, 2006, etc.) reconstructs the specifics of an accident few Americans recall. Although the 1979 partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island is better known, the author makes a persuasive case that the Idaho explosion played a significant role in the development of nuclear power in America. Seeing this story as a morality tale with heroes and villains, the author is especially critical of Admiral Hyman Rickover, who used his considerable stature within the Navy to squelch anyone who questioned “his powerful advocacy of nuclear propulsion…to the exclusion of all other forms of sea power.” Tucker scants rumors that an adulterous affair had sparked enmity between two reactor crewmen who were killed, though he does acknowledge that they had clashed ever since arriving at the site 15 months earlier. Debates over the value of the nuclear navy, combined with political and personal maneuverings, could have produced a riveting, genre-crossing account—if, say, Tom Clancy and Danielle Steele had collaborated on it. Unfortunately, Tucker lacks their storytelling flair; his workmanlike prose sometimes makes it a chore to get through the text.
Cliché-filled take on a compelling story.Pub Date: March 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4433-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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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