Bright, well-written and highly informative.
A history of the navigational tools that tell us where we are.
In his debut, Boston Globe technology reporter Bray notes that for most of human history, we lacked maps and navigational tools. Early sailors relied on the wind and waves to get their bearings. In Europe, maps first appeared on Spanish cave walls 14,000 years ago. Today, “mankind has essentially solved the problem of location” due to a remarkable spate of navigational innovation in the 20th century, much of it prompted by the demands of the two world wars. Beginning in ancient times with the great cartographer Ptolemy, Bray recounts the story of mapping and navigational systems through the work of an array of inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs. In the 16th century, mapmaker Gerhard Mercator made it possible to plot an accurate course at sea. In the early 20th century, inventor Elmer Sperry created gyroscopes to steer aircraft and cruise missiles. In the 1990s, Stephen Poizner perfected the phone-based GPS technology that turned smartphones into portable navigators. Indeed, GPS, born in the Cold War, “has indelibly altered the way we live and work and travel.” Bray also describes the development of WiFi navigation; the eye-level, street-by-street views of Google Maps; and the Google Earth images, which allow us to see our own homes as well as the Parthenon and the Grand Canyon. The author provides fascinating stories on the use of these technologies, from the mapping of North Korea by amateur cartographers to the “crisis mapping” that redraws the maps of a country in the wake of a disaster. Bray calls for limits on government use of advanced location techniques to track citizens, noting that police departments now “keep tabs on us with almost Orwellian diligence.” It takes just three months’ worth of location data for a researcher to predict a person’s next move with accuracy.
Bright, well-written and highly informative.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-03285-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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