A winning, enlightening investigation into wind engineering and the man who made the airwaves speak.
A richly drawn portrait of Alan Davenport (1932–2009), the maestro of “balancing the wind’s fickle forces.”
Davenport was not just a wind engineer, writes freelance science journalist Roberts (King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry, 2006); “he set the agenda for investigating the effects of wind on the natural and built environments,” chiefly through his path-breaking dedicated boundary layer wind tunnel. The tunnel measures the effects of wind from the earth’s surface to 3,000 feet in altitude, where it is at its most turbulent, churning in eddies, or, as Roberts puts it, “marbled striations of air.” This is only one example of the author’s lovely way with words, her artful ability to give the mind’s eye entry into difficult scientific terrain. She is at ease writing pure popular science—how Davenport put his wind tunnel to use to help understand sail design or the winds at Augusta National Golf Club’s famous 12th hole—as well as the dark matter of wind correlation and buffeting theory. There is a fine introduction to the history of wind theory and limpid explanations of such phenomena as viscosity, before Roberts goes on to detail a number of Davenport’s more famous projects, such as the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower, Shanghai’s World Financial Center, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge and Florida’s Sunshine Skyway. A final chapter testifies to Davenport’s forward thinking as he tackled disaster mitigation, again with his wind tunnel, using models of local topography to avoid obvious landscape traps in the event of natural disasters.
A winning, enlightening investigation into wind engineering and the man who made the airwaves speak.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-691-15153-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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.
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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