A page-turning account of the scientists, inventors, and eccentrics of the OSS in a critical period of conflict.
An engaging study of a secretive government group created “to develop and deploy all of the dirty tricks that were needed to win the greatest war in history.”
Stories about spy agencies are always intriguing, and there is still much to be explored about the work of the Office of Strategic Services. Lisle, an academic historian of science and the intelligence community, delves into the work of the Research and Development Branch of the OSS, which was responsible for the invention of new weapons and techniques for the military as well as for the resistance movements fighting behind the enemy lines. The key figure is Stanley Lovell (1927-2010), who was recruited by OSS director William “Wild Bill” Donovan to head the branch. Lovell was an industrial chemist with a good eye for innovation, and he brought a number of colorful characters into the group. Even before the U.S. was formally at war, the R&D branch was developing weapons for sabotage, such as silenced guns, time-delay fuses for explosives, and magnetic mines. One of the most useful inventions was “Aunt Jemima,” an explosive compound that could be camouflaged as pancake flour. The branch also provided fake documents, disguises, and cover stories for spies. Some of the ideas that the branch explored were merely fanciful—e.g., the plan to use bats to deliver incendiary bombs. Studies on biological and chemical warfare were more serious but raised difficult moral questions. The war ended before research in these areas came to fruition. Lisle believes that the work of the R&D branch made a critical contribution to the war effort, but he acknowledges that there is still controversy about the overall effectiveness of the OSS. Regardless, it’s a fascinating story, and with the use of newly unearthed documents and interview material, the author tells it well. With careful research and a dry wit, Lisle finds much to say about the backroom war.
A page-turning account of the scientists, inventors, and eccentrics of the OSS in a critical period of conflict.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781250280244
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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