Appearances to the contrary, this is not a remake of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Rhodes's very successful technical chronicle of the Manhattan Project. In that book, which was honored with a National Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Pulitzer Prize, Rhodes stuck closely to his topic. Here, it is not until halfway through the book, literally, that he begins to talk specifically about the hydrogen bomb. Up to then he mainly discusses Soviet atomic espionage and the early history of the Soviet atomic bomb program, a subject covered much more authoritatively and concisely in David Holloway's Stalin and the Bomb (1994). One has the impression that Rhodes just wants to show off what he has learned from the newly opened Soviet archives. Only well into the book does it become clear that what mainly interests him is the battle between J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller over the development of the hydrogen bomb and the direction national policy would take in the 1950s: Their battle for the soul of the American public was Oppenheimer's tragic undoing, stripped him of his security clearances, and removed him from US policy-making; Teller's semi- Pyrrhic victory left him a virtual pariah in the world of physics. Rhodes brings to that story sound judgment, a sharp eye for intrinsically fascinating detail, andnot leasta nice way with words. His down-to-earth manner also leads Rhodes to nose out little-remarked nuggets, telling us, for example, that the famous atomic spy Klaus Fuchs and mathematician John von Neumann filed a patent together for the H-bomb in 1946. This big book is not necessarily the best place to get the big picture. But who cares? Rhodes manages to fit in a wealth of interesting detail without worrying too much about how it all hangs together. (First printing of 100,000; first serial to the New Yorker; Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club alternate selections; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80400-X
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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