A well-crafted combination of technology history, tortuous military politics, and the biography of a shamefully neglected...
A history of the attack submarine and its inventor, who “would never know that he had helped create one of the defining killing machines of two world wars.”
Historians pay great attention to humankind’s yearning to fly. The desire to travel underwater turns out to be equally fascinating, with many difficult technical barriers and a fiercely single-minded inventor, John Philip Holland (1841-1914), who is now mostly forgotten. The story is well-told by historian and journalist Goldstone (Drive: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age, 2016). Holland arrived from Ireland in 1873, already fascinated by submarines. Faced with an indifferent U.S. Navy, he struggled for more than two decades to obtain financing. No sooner had he succeeded when Navy “experts” demanded changes that converted his plans to a lugubrious Rube Goldberg–esque contraption. Holland essentially abandoned it and built the submarine he had designed. Tested in 1898, it thrilled observers, including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, who urged superiors to buy the machine. They refused. His money exhausted, Holland had no choice but to accept the offer of a rescuer, Isaac Rice, wealthy owner of many businesses, including some that supplied Holland. In exchange for financial aid, Holland turned over his patents and control of the company. Rice had no interest in sharing power, and Holland resigned after several frustrating years. Litigation prevented him from starting a rival company, and his death after 10 years of retirement went unnoticed. Rice’s capital and connections worked their magic on the Navy, which bought its first submarine, the USS Holland, in 1900 but remained lukewarm about buying more. Rice eventually struck it rich but not until World War I broke out.
A well-crafted combination of technology history, tortuous military politics, and the biography of a shamefully neglected American inventor.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-429-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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