A rich journalistic account.
Lively, often disturbing history of the largest atom in nature.
Natural uranium, element 92, is only mildly radioactive and can’t make a bomb, notes journalist Zoellner (The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire, 2006). But one uranium atom among 140 is slightly lighter—U-235 as opposed to U-238. During the 1930s German scientists discovered that adding a neutron to U-235 split it into two fragments (fission) and released enormous energy. If a critical mass of U-235 (about 110 pounds) could be brought together, a tremendous explosion would result. Separating U-235 from U-238 was an expensive, complex industrial process, and only the United States could afford to do it while simultaneously fighting a war. Plenty of authors, led by Richard Rhodes, have recounted the making of the atomic bomb, but Zoellner excels in describing the postwar years—the wild, worldwide uranium-mining boom that accompanied other nations’ rush to develop a bomb. The author scorns the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, seeing it as an arrogant but ineffectual attempt by the nuclear powers to freeze out the competition. Uranium mining crashed after American and Soviet arsenals filled, resumed in the ’70s as nuclear power flourished, crashed again in the ’80s after the Chernobyl disaster and is booming again today, as China industrializes. An additional boost is the fact, acknowledged even by environmentalists, that nuclear power plants release no greenhouse gases. Despite some gruesome descriptions of the plight of uranium miners and modest attention to nuclear safety and the growing problem of nuclear waste, Zoellner generally stresses the positive features of uranium and its applications.
A rich journalistic account.Pub Date: March 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02064-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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
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
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