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From parlor trick to weapon of war, invisible ink and other means of hidden writing emerge as one of mankind’s more intriguing inventions in this lively history.Georgia Tech history professor Macrakis (Seduced by Secrets, 2008) surveys 2,000 years of secret messages penned with an improbable variety of substances and methods: lemon juice, various bodily fluids and other liquids that dry invisibly on the page but turn brown when exposed to heat. Gall-nut extract, for instance, a traditional ink used by George Washington’s agents, turns black when brushed with iron sulfate, and cobalt solutions painted on fire screens blossom into brilliant green foliage when warmed. Some modern inks require four different chemical treatments to develop; an invisible ink invented by Linus Pauling shows up only when treated with a specific antibody. Aside from chemical compounds, microdots can cram pages of documents into a tiny spot the size of the period at the end of this sentence, and digital encoding techniques allow messages to be inserted into Internet porn. Macrakis offers lucid explanations of the chemistry and optics underlying the seemingly magical properties of invisible inks, and she even appends recipes that guide readers in making some of the simpler varieties. The heart of her book, though, is the cat-and-mouse game between spies who conceal their reports in plain sight and counterintelligence officials trying to intercept and detect them, a saga she follows from the subterfuges of Mary Queen of Scots to dueling Cold War intelligence agencies. Her chronicle luxuriates in colorful characters—Jesuits plotting to escape from the Tower of London, James Bond–ian playboy-spies and Mata Hari–like femmes fatales—and intricate cloak-and-dagger featuring inks secreted in fake molars and infused into garments. It’s also a story of government surveillance at a level that would make Edward Snowden cringe: During the world wars, Britain and the U.S. opened millions of letters and tested them for invisible messages. Macrakis unearths a wealth of information, including secret documents she mined from East Germany’s Stasi archives, weaving it together with engaging prose that illuminates a seldom-seen aspect of espionage.An engrossing study of unseen writing and the picaresque misadventures of those who employ it.
None NonePub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0300179255
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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