Neufeld’s is the definitive biography, but Biddle offers a solid, moderately damning investigation of von Braun’s relation...
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Biddle (A Field Guide to the Invisible, 1998, etc.) recounts the early years of the quintessential “rocket scientist” and hero of America’s 1960s race to the moon.
Von Braun (1912–1977) led the team that designed the Saturn V, still the world’s most powerful rocket, and the only one that never failed. Even before America’s moon landing, he was a prominent media figure, narrating a Disney TV special on space flight and writing and speaking incessantly on interplanetary travel. Before World War II, von Braun directed Germany’s rocket program, which developed the V2, a military weapon capable of killing thousands. Anxious to exploit German technology, the United States discouraged investigations into von Braun’s activities under Hitler, and the scientist denied Nazi sympathies, maintaining that space travel was his obsession. Biddle disagrees. With a jaundiced eye, the author examines von Braun’s spectacular rise from a 20-year-old engineering student to, within five years, chief of a massive secret rocket-development project. Biddle makes a convincing case that von Braun had no objection to Hitler and regularly visited the squalid Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp where thousands died working to assemble the V2. Like Michael Neufeld’s Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (2007), Biddle asserts that the rocket scientist made a Faustian bargain with evil to further his ambitions. Unlike Neufeld, and less convincingly, he suggests that von Braun was a self-promoting charlatan, neither as preoccupied with space as he claimed nor as skilled an engineer.
Neufeld’s is the definitive biography, but Biddle offers a solid, moderately damning investigation of von Braun’s relation to the Third Reich.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-05910-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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