An impressive dual history of a military disaster and a scientific breakthrough.
A revealing history of a 1943 German bombing of Allied shipping that came with unexpected consequences.
Three months after the invasion of Italy, the southern harbor of Bari was busy and almost undefended when the Luftwaffe attacked, sinking 17 ships and producing damage and casualties comparable to Pearl Harbor. Bestselling author and historian Conant begins with a vivid description of the December 1943 raid, an event that proved to be a terrible embarrassment to the Allies, who made a partially successful effort to suppress news of the attack. They were better able to hide what happened over the next days and weeks. Victims appeared burned and blistered, yet their hair and eyebrows were unburned. Their eyes and throat were inflamed, and they often died with what seemed like pneumonia. Ultimately, about 600 were affected. Some doctors suspected that they were seeing symptoms of mustard gas exposure. Conant’s hero in this fascinating and often gruesome story is Lt. Col. Stewart Francis Alexander, the Allied physician in charge of the Chemical Warfare Service. Arriving in Bari at the request of the local doctors, he confirmed their diagnosis and, despite vigorous denials from military officials, determined the source: an American ship carrying a cargo of mustard gas bombs. The Allied high command accepted his report but classified it until long after the war. This suppression did not include results from Alexander’s meticulous research, which included autopsies, blood tests, and tissue samples. He reported that the gas killed victims’ rapidly dividing blood and lymphatic cells. Since cancer cells also divide rapidly, here was a chemical that would destroy them. Alexander returned to private practice after the war, but his findings galvanized the few medical researchers looking for drugs to fight cancer. Smoothly switching gears, Conant devotes the final third of her book to the early efforts, which were dogged by controversy and disappointment but began achieving permanent cures by the 1960s.
An impressive dual history of a military disaster and a scientific breakthrough.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00250-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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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