A slow burn with an exciting finale.
The story of the first “smart” weapon.
On the first page of his second book, Washington, D.C.–based journalist Holmes introduces his protagonist, Merle Tuve, who would become the leader of “Section T,” a scientific research-and-development group tasked with designing a new type of fuse for anti-aircraft shells. In the early days of World War II, naval gunners were practically defenseless against fighter planes and bombers. The author describes the antiquated, inefficient process of loading and aiming shells meant to bring down enemy planes before they could sink battleships and destroyers. “No wonder it took thousands of rounds to knock one ‘bird’ out of the sky,” he writes. “No wonder every ack-ack gunner dreamed of a shell that could automatically explore near a target.” Officials realized that the war would be won by air power and, thus, also by air defense. Tuve was responsible for developing a new kind of fuse for these shells, one that did not require nearly impossible feats of technical calculations performed in seconds against planes moving hundreds of miles per hour. The proximity fuse he created was a work of true genius, but like any great invention, it required immense amounts of perseverance and human ingenuity. Using radio waves to detect proximity, the fuse was able to make shells that were far more accurate than anything before. Holmes also focuses on the creation of the V-1 flying bomb, the Nazi “superweapon.” His harrowing description of London under incessant bombardment in the months after D-Day makes the success of the fuse all the more amazing. The author’s chronicle of the Battle of the Bulge and the decisive role of proximity fuses in that final confrontation is equally fascinating. Holmes is a meticulous historian, and while his story begins a bit sluggishly with the painstaking scientific and political efforts necessary to deploy the proximity fuse, he ends up showing how this technological marvel played an invaluable role in winning the war. A slow burn with an exciting finale. (16-page photo insert)Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-46012-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
HISTORY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | MODERN | HOLOCAUST | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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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