An unquestionably valuable service, well-written and tremendously informed, for the families of airmen lost during the Cold...
A passionate look at the hidden role played by aerial spying during the Cold War.
The Cold War ended just a little over a decade ago, and it will probably be many years before its complete history is set down. But here, Burrows (Journalism/NYU; This New Ocean, 1998, etc.) fills in some of the blanks by providing a detailed account of aerial intelligence between 1950 and 1970. Far from providing just a technical history, the author highlights the stories of the aviators and crew who risked (and occasionally suffered) capture, torture, and death in the service of a country that was often oblivious to their existence. Many readers will be surprised to learn that no fewer than 163 airmen died as a result of reconnaissance missions, most of which were not acknowledged at the time. To this end, much of this story reads as an oral history provided by the surviving pilots, including many harrowing tales of survival and imprisonment. However, Burrows does not neglect the technical dimensions of aerial intelligence, such as the development of the SR-71 Blackbird, which replaced the famed U2, and the dawn of the satellite era, which largely, but not completely, supplanted the use of spy planes. Burrows is also careful to place aerial spying in its larger institutional and political contexts. His chapter on General Curtis LeMay and the Strategic Air Command is chilling, but made comprehensible by his attention to the atmosphere of Cold War paranoia that prevailed at the time. Burrows rightly emphasizes the benefit of the knowledge gained from aerial intelligence but downplays the tensions produced by the illegal over flights of other nations’ territory.
An unquestionably valuable service, well-written and tremendously informed, for the families of airmen lost during the Cold War—and for everyone else now beginning to process the meaning of that part of recent history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11747-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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