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THE EMPEROR’S CODES

THE BREAKING OF JAPAN’S SECRET CIPHERS

A fine contribution to the genre: The author has done his homework well, interviewing survivors and poring over old records...

An account of American and British operations that broke Japanese codes during WWII.

Japan and Germany did not lose the war because of the Allied advantage in numbers and material—all the big turning-point battles occurred early on, when the Allies were outnumbered. It was stupidity that defeated the Axis, and nothing illustrates this better than the story of codebreaking. In 1943, when fighters shot down a transport carrying Admiral Yamamoto, it was publicized as a lucky accident—but, in fact, details of his flight had been broadcast by the Japanese and intercepted. Inferior American forces could not have won the key naval battle of Midway without knowledge of enemy positions given by Japanese transmissions: American submarines devastated Japanese shipping because we knew their routes and positions. Even Pearl Harbor came as a shock not through poor codebreaking, but because US intelligence concentrated on reading the Japanese diplomatic (rather than military) code. We knew their diplomats negotiating in Washington were not serious and that Japan was about to launch a war, but the details were elsewhere. British journalist Smith (Station X, not reviewed) includes a fascinating step-by-step explanation of codebreaking, but most readers will probably not be able to follow beyond the first steps. Because of their difficult language and sense of intellectual superiority, the Japanese assumed their codes were unbreakable—but they were merely difficult. The codebreakers themselves were a collection of academics, geniuses, and eccentrics assisted by a vast army of clerks (including many women). There were also plenty of small-minded bureaucrats and arrogant (mostly American) officials unwilling to share information, so progress was often unnecessarily slow.

A fine contribution to the genre: The author has done his homework well, interviewing survivors and poring over old records to tell the story of one of the greatest capers of the century.

Pub Date: July 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-55970-568-X

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Arcade

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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