Vividly told, the interplay of personalities that would ultimately transform the world.
Revisiting the Manhattan Project and the production of the first atomic bomb—and the man who assembled and directed its cast of thousands.
Once again, the author mines the experiences of her grandfather, 20-year Harvard president James Conant, who also served as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee during WWII. Unlike her previous bestselling venture (Tuxedo Park, 2002), which revealed the obscure but fascinating Alfred Lee Loomis, Conant deals here with a subject and personality on which volumes have already been produced. However, by concentrating on the human aspects of the group—including some of the most brilliant and talented scientists of the era J. Robert Oppenheimer was able to cajole into spending over two years of their lives on a remote mesa near Los Alamos—the author is able to generate a spellbinding account of a venture that often teetered on the brink while the future of the world lay at stake. Oppenheimer is likewise shown as perhaps the one individual who could have pulled it off. Manhattan may never even have gotten off the ground, for example, had he not been able to talk crusty General Leslie Groves, the Project’s military overseer, out of swearing in every scientist as a commissioned Army officer and making them wear fatigue uniforms “while on duty.” He was an intense, engagingly intellectual motivator, but he was not, the author often points out, a paragon, easily capable of approaching hysterics in impending crises and unfairly deflecting blame on subordinates. Oppenheimer did, however, shoulder full responsibility from start to finish, which left him with the feeling, as he later told President Truman, of having “blood on my hands.” A high point here is the intensely graphic recollection by participants, including James Conant, of the Trinity event, the initial bomb test, where uncertainty was overwhelming.
Vividly told, the interplay of personalities that would ultimately transform the world.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5007-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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