A well-researched, compellingly written, crucial addition to the literature of American involvement in World War II.
A previously untold history of the American women who served as codebreakers during World War II.
When Hidden Figures—both the book and the movie it inspired—reached popular audiences, many Americans were surprised to learn that women played an instrumental role at NASA in the 1960s. That women have long been excluded from professional and intellectual life is well-known. That women have, during times of national crisis or fervor, bypassed that exclusion has not been so well-known. During the war, writes former Washington Post reporter Mundy (The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family, 2012, etc.), some 11,000 women served the war effort by working as codebreakers. Almost 70 percent of the Army’s codebreaking force was female, and at least 80 percent of the Navy’s. In addition to breaking enemy codes, they also tested American codes, ran complicated office machines, built libraries of intelligence, and worked as translators. At first, the military recruited only college-educated women strong in science, math, or languages; later, as the field rapidly expanded, many thousands more women were welcomed. Their jobs were intensely difficult, stimulating, and vital to the war effort. Because of the sensitive nature of their work, they told anyone who asked (including their own families) that they were doing low-level office tasks. Mundy is a fine storyteller, effectively shaping a massive amount of raw research into a sleek, compelling narrative. She had access to boxes of Army and Navy memos, reports, and internal histories, and she also interviewed some of the women who served as codebreakers. Unfortunately, she only briefly touches on the African-American women who worked on codes and never mentions the Navajo Code Talkers who served the same effort. Despite those omissions and the occasional cliché, the book is a winner. Her descriptions of codes and ciphers, how they worked and how they were broken, are remarkably clear and accessible.
A well-researched, compellingly written, crucial addition to the literature of American involvement in World War II.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-35253-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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