Vivid derring-do moves swiftly through a carefully constructed espionage thriller.
An exciting history of the battle for atomic supremacy during World War II.
The core mission of the quasi-military group called “Alsos,” part of the Manhattan Project, which was led by colorful scientist Boris Pash, was to determine the extent of Nazi efforts to produce an atomic bomb and to thwart it by any means possible. The Reich, after all, had world-class physicists like Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg. The Allies, too, had considerable talent, most notably Enrico Fermi. Science writer Kean (Caesar's Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us, 2017, etc.) enlists several supporting players who had largely incidental, though dramatic, parts in the effort to deny the Germans’ attempts to create an atomic bomb. There was Moe Berg, a spy and professional baseball catcher, who had the chance to capture or kill Heisenberg—but he was uncertain. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. perished in a nutty scheme to destroy what was thought to be a delivery system for nuclear weapons. The cast of characters, all well delineated by the author, include Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot, Robert Oppenheimer, Wernher von Braun, and Gen. Leslie Groves. “Known as a brilliant but ruthless manager—simultaneously the best construction foreman and the biggest asshole in the military—Groves was in charge of all army construction within the United States and on offshore bases at the war’s outset,” writes the author, who helps readers keep other characters straight with amusing descriptors: A colonel at Rennes was a “big swinging dick”; a “babbling” Neils Bohr “was simply incapable of keeping his trap shut.” Throughout, Kean eschews erudite fastidiousness for consistent action and brio. Beginning with the title, the narrative is an engrossing cinematic drama, not an academic text. (Spoiler: Hitler, who was never much interested in science, lost.)
Vivid derring-do moves swiftly through a carefully constructed espionage thriller.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-38168-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 Yorker staff 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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