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HOW TO PHOTOGRAPH AN ATOMIC BOMB

It’s a new age for nonfiction and this project brightly shows the way.

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An in-depth look at an esoteric facet of a popular subject, namely the technological innovations necessary to photograph nuclear weapons tests.

Written and researched by the Academy-Award-winning filmmaker behind Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie, this multimedia counterpart to the title’s existing print versions comes with sky-high expectations. In a design that mimics the precision of a nuclear scientist’s statistical chart, Kuran’s work chronicles not so much the development of atomic weapons, but the parallel development of the classified projects tasked with photographing the weapons on display. Kuran gives just enough detail to intrigue photographic laymen but isn’t afraid to describe some of the more eye-glazing technical aspects that make photographing an atomic detonation a singular event. For anyone doubting the functionality of e-books, this will make a believer of at least the nonfiction reader. Complete with gorgeous stills of megaton mushroom clouds, the electronic format also allows Kuran to incorporate film footage of gargantuan water columns rising from the South Pacific and another explosion’s pressure wave blowing apart a home miles from the blast. It’s a guilty pleasure, and as a historical or technological narrative or ethical treatise, it is left a bit wanting. But this is a picture book for the history buff of the 21st century. Full of Atomic-Age atmosphere, the photographs of the special cameras used in these endeavors reveal them to be as complex as we imagine the bombs must have been. The many pictures of skinny, diligent, high-waisted, goggled men in their baggy uniforms enjoying the lightshow give off an uncomfortable radiance that is both supreme camp and awesome dread. Whether a reader loves weaponry, photography or midcentury American kitsch, this is a true cultist’s delight, and Kuran’s love affair with the subject is on display. Readers will find the ability to control the speed and even time direction of the unique footage terribly addicting.

It’s a new age for nonfiction and this project brightly shows the way.

Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2011

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011

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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 Yorkerstaff 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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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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