Book Description
A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world’s “great hush”
In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.
Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners, scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed, and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth. Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today. Meanwhile, Crippen, “the kindest of men,” nearly commits the perfect crime.
With his superb narrative skills, Erik Larson guides these parallel narratives toward a relentlessly suspenseful meeting on the waters of the North Atlantic. Along the way, he tells of a sad and tragic love affair that was described on the front pages of newspapers around the world, a chief inspector who found himself strangely sympathetic to the killer and his lover, and a driven and compelling inventor who transformed the way we communicate. Thunderstruck presents a vibrant portrait of an era of séances, science, and fog, inhabited by inventors, magicians, and Scotland Yard detectives, all presided over by the amiable and fun-loving Edward VII as the world slid inevitably toward the first great war of the twentieth century. Gripping from the first page, and rich with fascinating detail about the time, the people, and the new inventions that connect and divide us, Thunderstruck is splendid narrative history from a master of the form.
Customer Reviews:
Thoroughly Enjoyable if Not as 'Tight' as the first two books.......2007-10-15
As in his first two books, Larson takes two subjects that are tangential to each other and tells each story in alternating chapters until they intersect. Guglielmo Marconi (half-Italian, half-English) is the inventor of wireless telegraphy; while Dr. Hawley Crippen is an American ex-pat in England making his money by making and selling 'patent' medicine.
The men could not be more different, though they had the same overall appearance (not tall for even that generation and thin). Marconi was a driven single minded man who craved recognition and laurels. Crippen was a 'casper milktoast' type who for many years supported a wife whose life was wrapped up in the pursuit of a 'theatrical career'. Whereas Marconi spent extravagantly on himself, Crippen's wife spent extravagantly on clothing and jewelry for herself.
Larson weaves the story of Marconi's 'invention' and commercialization of 'wireless' telegraphy (which led to Radio and Television transmission), and Crippen's flight from his wife and her murder (whose guilt Larson leaves as the quandary for the reader). They intersect when Crippen tries to escape justice by sailing to Canada, only to be identified by the captain of his ship who notifies Scotland Yard by 'Marconigram'. Just like in a 'forties' Sherlock Holmes movie, Chief Inspector Dew sails (unbeknown) after Crippen on a faster ship, and is waiting for him as his comes into Canada. Ta Da!
It's a (rousing) good story but just not as tightly woven as his first two books.
Fascinating.......2007-10-11
I recently read Devil in the White City, so I was eager to read Thunderstruck as well. For the most part, I wasn't disappointed. Like its predecessor, Thunderstruck follows the stories of two men: Marconi, a young and hotheaded inventor, and Crippen, an unassuming middle-aged man who murdered his wife Belle and took off with his mistress, Ethel, to escape detection by the police. She clearly had no knowledge of the murder and regarded their flight aboard the ship Montrose (with her dressed as a boy) as a great adventure. Using the Marconi wireless system, the ship's captain was able to notify the police of their presence on board his ship.
As with his previous book, Larson writes this one as though it's fiction, deftly interweaving the two stories together. I found the murder mystery to be especially intriguing. However, I thought Larson could have toned down all the scientific stuff in the parts about Marconi. And there could have been less focus on him and more on the Crippen case. It only so happened that Marconi's invention occurred around the same time that this case did, and it only so happened that the ship he and Ethel were on had the Marconi wireless system.
But in all I thought this book was well-written and, as evidenced by the Notes section in the back of the book, well-researched. Also, I thought it was interesting that Alfred Hitchcock used elements of of the Crippen case in Rear Window.
Quite good, but I hope Larson doesn't get too formulaic........2007-10-01
No doubt about it, Thunderstruck is a good book. Erik Larson introduces you to Marconi, the Italian tinkerer/entrepreneur who took the budding technology of wireless and turned it into a commercially viable endeavor. It's a good story; Marconi has bitter and active rivals in the scientific and business communities, he has his own white whale (sending a signal all the way across the Atlantic Ocean) and he has trouble with normal human relations which makes for some engaging misadventures on the personal front. Not only is the story interesting and fun to read, it's also well-researched and well-written and you learn some history along the way with absolutely no pain. So far, so good.
Then, Larson introduces you to a kindly American doctor who marries a woman who is an unkind, duplicitous user of people. He takes you on a journey through their troubled relationship which eventually carries them to London where both seem to have inappropriate extra-marital relationships while trying to keep up appearances in public of a solid marriage. Things continue along until one night the wife pushes the timid doctor just a little too far and... you'll have to read the book.
Not a bad story either, and the two stories eventually come together as they always do in Larson's books, which brings me to a concern: I hope Larson doesn't limit himself to a single formula where a crime story and a more traditional historic tale come together in the end. It's not that it's a bad idea, it's just starting to feel forced in this book, especially after Devil in the White City. Larson is a very strong researcher and a great writer and story-teller. He could easily do a more traditional history book and make it come alive without the help of a crime tale.
Still highly recommended, just hoping Larson's next book doesn't feel compelled to be just like its two fore bearers.
Not up to Par..........2007-08-18
Larson is going down hill. Isaac's Storm was fabulous... his other titles pale in comparison.
The Roll of Disparate Thunder.......2007-08-17
THUNDERSTRUCK is a splendid work of non-fiction that engages the reader as well as any novel. The author deftly combines the stories of two disparate lives -- Gugliemo Marconi, inventor of the wireless, and Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, milquetoast doctor, husband, and murderer. The latter would become the first criminal tracked and captured with the assistance of wireless communication.
Erik Larsen, whose DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY engaging recounts murder in Chicago at the time of the 1893 World's Fair, this time turns his attention to the late 1890s and 1900s in London. He possesses a singular gift for both storytelling and for weaving plotlines to a thrilling climax. Both stories are engaging in their own right; together, they are retold in a strikingly refreshing way. Highly recommended.
Book Description
The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister is a sweeping, dramatic account of how three great figures changed the course of history, as told by John O'Sullivan, former editor of National Review and the Times of London, who knew all three and has conducted exclusive interviews that shed extraordinary new light on these giants of the twentieth century.
Customer Reviews:
The President The Pope and The Prime Minister.......2007-10-11
3 people who advanced democracy around the world. Principals over politics. Today we only have wimps instead of statesmen like these three
And they all lived happily ever after..........2007-07-19
I try. I really try to get through this sort of stuff. But I'm familiar with a tourist's view of Washington, DC and realize that most people want the "founding fathers," for example, to be Disney characters.
O'Sullivan knows that his audience wants that too.
Does anyone remember the "social contract?" You know, when a few people felt we have responsibilities to each other? Reagan was, in real life, the lieutenant of a few ideologues who wanted to get us away from that infectious attitude.
As to Maggie Thatcher, excuse me, LADY Thatcher, she was ultimately responsible for "The Full Monty." You know, let's break up the unions and put well-paid working people out of work. Then there's J2P2. Actually, the pope said some worthwhile things, challenging what we're doing to Iraq, for example. But I think it was Penny Lernoux who suggested before she died that he was more appropriate to a Soviet satellite state than he was in a Church in which adults make up their own minds.
In short, this really is a kid's book. And if you have a mind capable of recognizing that the world is more complex than the Bros. Grimm, don't waste your money on it.
Two Great Men, One Great Woman.......2007-07-15
There is a theory in history called the Great Man Theory, which seeks to explain the events of history principally by looking at the impact of pivotal men and women who played a role in world events. On it's most simplistic level, the theory does make some sense. It's hard to imagine the American Revolution happening the way it did without the role played by men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or even King George III. It's equally hard to imagine World War II and all that has happened since without taking into account the individual decisions and personalities of Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin.
The academic left, though, has generally rejected the Great Man Theory and looks to economic, technological, and other factors to explain history. To them, the role of the individual in history is insignificant compared to the role that these "forces" play. What they forget, of course, is that economics, technology, and culture are all created by individuals. So arguing that "forces" rule history and that individual's are irrelevant is inherently irrational.
In reading The President, The Pope, And The Prime Minister, it's easy to see where John O'Sullivan comes down in this debate. He clearly believes that individuals play a vital role in history, and considering the three individuals he profiles -- Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher -- it's hard to argue with him.
The hyopthesis of O'Sullivan's book is fairly straightforward. Three individuals who, in the years just before they came to power, were believed to be outside of the mainstream of 1970s era thinking worked together, sometimes at cross purposes and often not consciously, to change the world by putting in place forces that led to the downfall of the Soviet Empire and the remaking of the world.
As O'Sullivan makes clear, the spark was lit in October 1978 when the Catholic Church did the unthinkable by electing a non-Italian Pope for the first time in over 450 years. And not only a non-Italian, put a man who came from behind the Iron Curtain and who had spent much of his career as a priest and bishop resisting tyranny, first from the Nazis and then from the Communists. His election set off a firestorm in Poland that led directly to the formation of Solidarity and its preservation through nearly a decade of martial law.
O'Sullivan also pays considerable attention to former President Reagan, his dealings with the Soviet Union, and, most interestingly, his view of the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War. Though it was not generally known at the time, and goes against what was being said about Reagan by his critics and even some of his supporters, it has become fairly clear in the years since he left office from the release of private writings that Reagan despised nuclear weapons and pursued a policy that had as its conscious goal their eventual elimination. While some might consider this attitude naive (after all, you can't put the nuclear genie back in the bottle), it sheds a new light on his approach to negotiations with the Soviets and the SDI program. Reagan knew that the Soviets could not compete with America technologically, and that they would never give up their nuclear arsenal willingly. So, he essentially played a waiting game until the "correlation of forces", to borrow a Marxist phrase, were such that that Soviets had no choice but to make a deal in a last ditch effort to save first their empire, and then their very existence.
Reagan told John Paul about his views on nuclear weapons, the Soviets, and the future of Europe early on. And the Holy Father clearly supported these views, as evidenced by the fact that while Catholic Bishops in the United States often spoke out against U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s (sometimes to the consternation of the Vatican), the Holy See rarely did.
O'Sullivan's perspective on Thatcher, and her relationships with Reagan, the Pope, and the Soviets are interesting especially given his connections to the British Conservative Party. What is clear, though, is that even Thatcher herself, clearly one of Reagan's closest friends in world politics, had no idea just how idealistic he was.
This book isn't ground breaking academic research, but it offers an interesting perspective on the life, times, and historical impact on three people who clearly changed the world for the better.
Ron, Maggie and the Pope.......2007-06-03
I read one review that said that they weren't on the same planet as these three leaders were doing their work. I was also on a different planet. I got so disilusioned with the Carter years that I completely turned politics off, and only took care of me and my family. As the years accumilated and GHW Bush became president, I had to return to reality. I have learned a lot about Reagan and JPII over the last few years especially after Mr. Reagan's death. Maggie is still an enigma to me. I want to really like her, but I understand that she was a real bugger to work for while Reagan was wonderful and of course JPII was a saint. Not to be outdone, Mikail was a horrible leader and was the primary reason, along with the decline of the Russian economy, crop disasters and an inempt military, Russia would have self destructed, I think, without much trouble. But the pressure that these THREE placed on the communist system from within is what crumpled the horrible experiment.
Along with Peggy Noonan's two books, one on Reagan and the other on John Paul II, this one is one of the best of the events of Reagans presidency and John Paul's term.
I recommend this book for anyone who want's to get to know how the wall fell and how God can help.
History as it should be written: fact-filled, detached and light on the bias.......2007-05-29
Very readable, smooth flowing inter-weaving of the stories of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II and how, working together, they changed the world. This is history as it should be written. Fact-filled. Detached. Light on the bias. Fascinating. The book is quick to read and hard to put down.
This is the story of three disparate personalities and their unlikely (and synchronous) rises to power. The elderly B-movie actor. The school-marmish scold. The non-Italian Catholic living under the thumb of officially atheistic communism. Together, they defeat the scourge of communism while simultaneously rescuing their respective polities from the slow death spiral of the 60s and 70s, whether than be Reagan resurrecting American swagger and putting the U.S. economy on sound footing, or Thatcher curing Britain of Euro-sclerosis, or the Holy Father rescuing the Catholic church for the suffocating forces of modernism and "reform."
This is an essential history of late 20th Century America and Great Britain. It is an essential history of the recent Catholic church. It is also very much a history of Poland, for it is that land that it is at the center of this narrative. Ronald Reagan always believed that the key to ending the Cold War lay with Poland. And it is events in Poland, from the papal visits, to the strike at the Gdansk shipyard, from the martial law of Jaruszelski, to the rise of Lech Walesa and Solidarity, that shape this story. Reagan's insight into the centrality of Poland proved astonishingly right.
This book is not just for us Republicans. For example, one Carter Era figure prominently and positively figures in events here: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security advisor. Brzezinski has not gotten enough credit for seizing control of events in Poland from the late Carter administration through the Reagan administration. This book gives him delayed credit.
Two (minor) criticisms of this book. First, the Holy Father drops out of the narrative, for the most part, in the last third of the book. More Pope, please! Second, the equation of the bombing of Mrs. Thatcher's hotel in 1984, does not really parallel the 1981 assassination attempts on President Reagan and Pope John Paul II. It's a reach that doesn't work. But these are very minor blemishes on a masterful book.
Book Description
Beginning with the chaotic post–World War I landscape in which religious belief was one way of reordering a world knocked off its axis, Sacred Causes is a penetrating critique of how religion has often been camouflaged by politics. All the bloody regimes and movements of the 20th century are masterfully captured here, from Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Franco's Spain to the war on terror. With style and sophistication, Michael Burleigh shows how the churches, in their various guises, have been swayed by–and contributed to–conflicting secular currents. Sacred Causes brilliantly exposes the way in which fears of socialist movements tempered the churches' response to the threat of totalitarian regimes.
Burleigh combines an authoritative survey of history with a timely reminder of the dangers of radical secularism. He asks why no one foresaw the religious implications of massive Third World immigration. And he deftly investigates what is now driving calls for a civic religion to counter the terrorist threats that have so shocked the West.
Customer Reviews:
Far too difficult to read.......2007-08-16
This book is stupidly difficult to read, and it was obviously written by a scholar, for other scholars. I'm not an unintelligent person by any means, but I can't understand half of what the author is saying.
Here are a few sentences from the book:
"As this carol indicates, the carnivalesque, allegedley playful aspects of Bolshevik cultural utopias had an intolerant, sinister aspect that was as inherent in the socialist project as the coercion and repression that were coeval with the regime, and integral to its revolutionary iconoclasm and Manichean, Red-and-White worldview. To detach utopian dreams from terror or to regard them as a colourful 'if-only' before the onset of Stalin's grey 'Thermidor' is to indulge in vicarious utopianism from the safety of the modern Western campus. Bolshevik utopianism, it has been argued, oscillated between an innate and pervasive peasant desire for dignity, equality, and justice and attempts to create militarised oases of order that tantalised aristocrats infatuated with ninteenth-century Prussia."
Now, can anyone explain what the hell that meant?
The entire book is written like this. Skip it.
The Uses of Religion.......2007-06-09
Secularists and progressives have long believed that religion was in a state of terminal decline. Religion, which they view as a dangerous form of ignorance, was steadily being displaced by the ever-expanding domain of reason and scientific knowledge. In the last quarter of a century scientific knowledge has grown faster than ever before; one would have expected religion to decline proportionally. On the contrary, the opposite has happened: Religion and its agitated by-product, religious fundamentalism, are gaining ground everywhere.
This is the second of a two-volume work by historian Michael Burleigh. In the first volume "Earthly Powers," he showed how secular ideologies from the Jacobins of the French Revolution to the anarchists of the Russian Revolution were influenced by and made use of religion. Religion - Christianity in particular - furnished the myths by which people mobilized and redeemed themselves in the secular sphere. As Burleigh points out in his first volume, he owes much of this insight on political religion to the work of Eric Voeglin.
In "Sacred Causes" Burleigh traces political religions from the interwar period to the present Islamic fundamentalism. Nazism and Communism were classic examples of political religions; they were messianic movements that offered redemption in an earthly manner. Both movements attempted to displace religion. In the interwar period religion became a symbol of a discredited past. People looked to science and militant nationalism to deliver them from the depths of the economic depression. In this atmosphere of seige the church was forced to make accommodations to the secular powers, at least in Germany. In the Soviet Union, the property of the church was confiscated by the state altogether.
Burleigh spends a great deal of time in this volume defending the actions of the Catholic Church against charges that it had some complicity in the crimes of the Nazis. He comes to the defense of Pope Pius XII. He praises the pope and the church for quietly keeping the church's message alive during those dark times. Critics, however, have much evidence to the contrary: the most notable example being the pro-Nazi Catholic regime in Serbia responsible for the murder of 350,000 Serbs and 30,000 Jews. Burleigh counters with many instances of the Catholic Church aiding Jews during the holocaust. But does this absolve the church of a long history of anti-Semitism going back to the Middle Ages? I think Burleigh is unconvincing here. If the Catholic Church was the force of good that he claims it would have done more to stop the mass murder.
Burleigh also has many grievances. One of the many objects of his scorn is Islam, and the disconcerting fact that mosques are popping up all over Europe. He thinks Tariq Ramadan is an apologist for al-Qaeda. His take is more than a little unbalanced. He fails to note that Islam, like Christianity, is made up of many different strains. Both have their moderates and their fundamentalists. Burleigh himself faces the danger, in this volume, of falling into the latter category.
What was the 20th century all about?.......2007-06-08
Burleigh argues, in this rich, meaty book, that the 20th century was all about the clash between religion and the state.
The 20th century opened with a set of swaggering new philosophies that were going to create a heaven on earth. Nietzche, before he descended into gibbering madness, declared that "God was dead". He expected a New Man, freed of the old, niggling 10 commandments, to lead humanity to a bright new future. What the world got was Hitler and death camps.
Then there was fascism, led by Mussolini, whose first book was, "God Does Not Exist".
And then there was communism, most potent of all, which slaughtered some 100 million people while trying to create heaven on earth. The late Pope John Paul, who lived under both the Nazis and the communists, called the 20th century "a pile of bodies".
In this sweeping, beautifully written book, Burleigh performs like a magician, always pulling out just the right, telling anecdote.
In the early part of the century, violence against the clergy peaked. In Spain during the civil war, "nearly 7,000 clerics were murdered" (p 132"), while atrocity was piled on atrocity. In Mexico priests were hunted and shot and convents closed.
Yet the most bloodthirsty of all would be communism. The communists used everything they could to fight against religion--threats, persecutions, show trials, mass starvation, and the near total destruction of all religious clergy. "By 1938 eighty bishops had lost their lives, while thousands of clerics were sent to the Solovetsky labour camp set up in a former monastery on an island in the White Sea" (p 47.
What bitter irony, then, that many now believe that it was religion that pulled down the whole grotesque regime. "Although they were subjected to relentless assault from state-sponsored atheism, the Christian Churches remained the only licensed sanctuaries from the prevailing world of brutality and lies" (p 344). Solidarity, Pope John Paul, and Poland brought down communism.
Yet we may well face an even more troubling era. Europe is beset with problems of a very different nature. As its native populations dwindle to nothing a flood of Muslim immigrants is taking over Amsterdam, Paris and London. What was once a vital continent filled with a vibrant Christianity is now dying. Authors such as Dawkins assault the very idea of religion while immigrants swarm into the country. Statistics show a vast numbers of these new Europeans want, not to do away with religion as Dawkins suggests, but to impose Sharia law.
Uneven and Misleading.......2007-03-18
Sacred Causes is the second book of 2 devoted to the conflict of religion and politics in recent European history. The first volume, Earthly Powers, was devoted to the 19th century and this one covers the 20th century. The quality of both books is uneven. This is a huge topic and Burleigh has not attempted the difficult job of a systematic analysis or structural overview. Like Earthly Powers, Sacred Causes is essentially a series of chronically arranged essays on aspects of the central topic. This approach served Burleigh well in some of his other work, notably his excellent book, The Third Reich, where he could incorporate a continuous narrative as a unifying armature for his essays. In both Sacred Causes and Earthly Powers, there is only a general theme and the quality of the essays/chapters varies significantly. Some are very good, some indifferent, some actually poor.
The best parts of Sacred Causes are the opening chapters in which Burleigh discusses the great, and greatly destructive, `political religions' of the 20th century. These are Marxism-Leninism and Fascism. As Burleigh is quick to point out, the description of these ideologies as `political religions' is not novel. This concept originated decades ago and has been used by quite a number of scholars, not least Burleigh in his fine work on the Nazi state. The political religion idea describes these secular ideologies as having the structural features of a religion with promises of individual and communal salvation, rescue from conditions of social degeneration, charismatic-prophetic leadership, and a strongly millennial flavor. Burleigh's analyses of these features of Nazism, Communism, and Italian Fascism are vivid and very well done. He has particularly nice descriptions of the efforts of the states adopting these ideologies to develop explicit ceremonial and public experiences aimed at displacing the rituals and experiences of genuine religion.
Burleigh follows with a considerably less successful effort to describe the responses of European churches to the challenge of political religions. This simply is too large a topic to be dealt with appropriately in the space allowed in the book. He concentrates primarily on the Catholic Church, and even more narrowly on the Vatican. Burleigh takes pains to present the Catholic Church as a foe of the emerging totalitarian regimes of the interwar period. While this is true in several important ways, it is also misleading in other, equally important senses. It is clear from Burleigh's text that true to its 19th century heritage, the Catholic Church in many European countries was no friend of liberal democracy. His account shows clearly the preference of the hierarchy of many countries and of the Vatican for traditionally oriented, authoritarian states. Burleigh attempts to gloss this over by describing the Church as having a choice between totalitarianism and weak democracy, but this obscures the negative role played by the Catholic Church in some of the weaker democracies of Europe. His own account of the Partito Popolare Italiano, the ancestor of the Italian Christian Democratic Party, shows that the Vatican preferred accommodation with Mussolini to bolstering the foundations of democracy in interwar Italy. Burleigh never discusses the changing role of the important German Catholic Center party in Weimar Germany. Under the leadership of Ludwig Kaas, a priest close to the German hierarchy and the Vatican, the Center Party ceased to be a pillar of democracy and Kaas led the Center Party into accommodation with the Nazis. Burleigh has a particularly one-sided discussion of that historiographic lightning rod, the Spanish Civil War, where his commentary will probably satisfy the most dogmatic defenders of General Franco.
There is a concerted effort to defend the wartime behavior of Pope Pius XII. Burleigh does well in defending Pius XII against charges of antisemitism and indifference to the fate of the Jews. Burleigh does less well in defending Pius against the most serious charge against the Pope; that Pius failed to exercise the moral leadership expected of the Vicar of Christ. Pius spent his career in the Vatican diplomatic service before ascending the Papal throne. At a time that required prophetic moral leadership, he was a cautious diplomat.
The remainder of the book is devoted to a series of chapters of varying interest and quality. There are very good descriptions of the post-WWII assaults on the churches of Eastern Europe. Other chapters describing the secularization of Europe in the 1960s, the role of churches in the end of the Cold War, the persistent problem of Northern Ireland, and the recent 9/11 tragedy are not so good. A lot of this discussion, for example, the denunciation of cultural changes in the 1960s, and the hagiographic treatment of the roles of Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II in the end of the Cold War, is trite and inaccurate. The chapter on Northern Ireland is a rhetorically interesting combination of attention to detail and tendentious sarcasm that veers into actual bigotry. Burleigh has an unfortunate tendency for nasty and irrelevant asides that disfigures many sections.
This book also has signs of being written hastily. Parts of the concluding chapter are simply hard to follow and there are a number of careless statements. Does Burleigh really believe that the USA has no social welfare system? There are a surprising number of factual errors throughout the book. Contrary to what Burleigh writes, the Civil War President of the Spanish Republic, Azana, was not a Socialist, Pol Pot was not educated at the Sorbonne, and the US Supreme Court has never banned prayer in US public schools.
All in all, a very disappointing performance.
A Very Good Read.......2007-03-17
A genuinely historical and very well-written account of the conflict between secularism and religion over the past hundred years or so. The former -- whether under the guise of humanism, liberalism, pseudo-conservatism, communism, or Nazism -- has, far more often than not, been the victor in these clashes of culture. But, of course, might doesn't make right (in addition, these victories have been transient, and far more illusory than substantive). No, it is religion that has tended to be on the right, albeit losing, side. There's no doubt, however, that this tradition is being challenged by present-day Islam, which appears to have the upper hand.
While our Muslim brethren are correct in despising a plethora of cultural pathologies, their embrace of indiscriminate and extreme violence is problematic...to say the least! No one who claims to be truly civilized can countenance their vile actions. But it's equally impossible to lend one's support to the egregious and depraved creed that is secular humanism. The solution is rooted in the West's embracing once again, at long last, its foundational Christianity. I'm not holding my breath. Well, it will be interesting to see how it plays out -- interesting, but unpleasant.
Book Description
Submarines had a vital, if often unheralded, role in the superpower navies during the Cold War. Their crews carried out intelligence-collection operations, sought out and stood ready to destroy opposing submarines, and, from the early 1960s, threatened missile attacks on their adversary’s homeland, providing in many respects the most survivable nuclear deterrent of the Cold War. For both East and West, the modern submarine originated in German U-boat designs obtained at the end of World War II. Although enjoying a similar technology base, by the 1990s the superpowers had created submarine fleets of radically different designs and capabilities. Written in collaboration with the former Soviet submarine design bureaus, Norman Polmar and K. J. Moore authoritatively demonstrate in this landmark study how differing submarine missions, antisubmarine priorities, levels of technical competence, and approaches to submarine design organizations and management caused the divergence.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent book.......2007-08-14
I sought a book with a serious overview of the topic of Cold War submarines, and not a book about one or another aspect of the topic. I ended up with a book that contains both an excellent overview as well as serious discussion of specific submarines, strategies, technologies and the men behind the scenes.
The story is well placed within the historical context of the political, military and economical events and processes of the Cold War. The text is well written and well structured.
Especially fascinating is the look behind the scenes of Soviet submarine design, construction and operations - those were among the best-kept secrets of the Soviet Union.
Besides dealing with "main stream" submarines, there are several interesting chapters about different experimental projects; rescue submarines and several fantasy projects, like freight vessels and aircraft carrying submarines.
Although the story is focused on the Cold War period, there is a detailed discussion of WWII technology that highly influenced Cold War designs, as well as descriptions of post Cold War vessels and fleets.
The book is well illustrated with photographs and line drawings.
Great book.......2007-03-16
Not as many actual pix of subs as most books but it is very well written and also dabbles into the politics and design that went on with each new design of submarine. Nice charts and missile specs and things like that. Goes into greater detail of the US boats more than Soviet.
Absolutely The Best.......2007-02-13
I was somewhat skeptical of this book when I saw nothing but 5 star reviews from purchasers of the title. However, having read it, this is THE Cold War submarine reference. It contains insights not only into the technologies deployed, but the rational (or in some cases the Irrational) that led to the development of the mysterious technological marvels we could only speculate on during the cold war. The authors clearly show both American and Soviet perspectives on the cold war submarine development. I found the information regarding the CONFORM design on 1967 to be of particular interest. Rickover's insistence on developing the 688 class killed CONFORM. Yet CONFORM was 40 years ahead of anything available at that time. It is interesting that the 688's were far more fragile than one might imagine. Yet Rickover insisted on having his way. Where would we be had the CONFORM design gone through?? This book is absolutely the best material that I have read to date on cold war submarines.
A very balanced overview.......2006-12-03
I knew about a Polmar from reading references in some papers, so I finally decided to give a try. I wasn't disappointed. There were lots of technical details giving an overview. Better yet, it is a balanced account - by no means are Americans portrayed as all powerful.
If there were two things it can be improved on - well, one would be the placement of the endnotes. It is a matter of taste, but considering how many there were and how interesting they were, it might have been more convenient to have put them at the bottom of the main text as footnotes for each page.
The second is that I would have killed for a chapter or two on "other than the equipment". Subs are not just their designers, their admirals and the technicals - it is also the men, their organization and their training. Polmar briefly goes over the differences, but it could have been given a full chapter or at least an Appendix if extra efficiency measures were applied to the pre-Cold War history stuff.
Now, I'm going to buy another Polmar book that would hopefully fill up the gap. Wish me luck.
Covers Much More than the Title indicates.......2006-03-10
I thoroughly agree with Mr. Dougherty's enthusiastic reader review. The authors have put together a virtual encyclopedia on modern sub design and construction with real insight into what the subs were intended to do, and how some politicians and bureaucrats sabotaged the projects. I found particularly illuminating how each side of the Soviet-US conflict used the records and existing prototypes of Nazi Germany's U-Boat experiments. Baker's line drawings and diagrams are quite helpful in visualizing the boats, as are the ample photos of the real subs and scale models. This is a book to which I will return again and again whenever there is some news item about
undersea naval competition.
Average customer rating:
- Calculations are only as good as your numbers
- Pants on fire?
- Accepted History & Chronology Must Be Changed.
- Very Interesting
- History as Science Fiction
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History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
Anatoly Fomenko
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Similar Items:
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They Cast No Shadows: A Collection of Essays on the Illuminati, Revisionist History, and Suppressed Technologies
ASIN: 2913621058 |
Book Description
Recorded history is a finely-woven magic fabric of intricate lies about events predating the sixteenth century. There is not a single piece of evidence that can be reliably and independently traced back earlier than the eleventh century. This book details events that are substantiated by hard facts and logic, and validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources.
Customer Reviews:
Calculations are only as good as your numbers.......2007-08-03
Yes, we can all agree that mainstream history is nearly 100% BS due to politics, economics, ego, problems with dating techniques, and various conspiracies. Agreed. But, I've been researching the distinct possibility that human history (in terms of civilizations) are much more ancient than we've been told, so coming across this book was very interesting to me. I wondered how Fomenko could be wrong (if at all) because he is very persuasive in his presentations. Then it dawned on me. If at previous times in prehistory, due to the various catastrophies that are well documented (comets, asteroids, planetary disruptions, plasma discharge, pole reversals, etc) the Earth was in a different position in relation to the sun, different tilt on its axis, different orbit, different rotation (in terms of velocity and DIRECTION), and the continents were in different positions, then would this not cause the ancients to see the sky (constellations) differently? In other words, is Fomenko making erronious assumptions about the physics of the Earth in pre-history, which then corrupt his data with regards to dating the relevant astrology? The last event to seriously disrupt our planet occured roughly 3500 years ago, according to other good researchers, so is it possible Fomenko has been confused by this? The vastly different physics of our planet in the not so distant past may explain this confusion, which is not to say the "mainstream" version of history is correct; on the contrary. I am not an expert in these fields, but wanted to see if this idea could spark discussion.
Pants on fire?.......2007-07-19
Will people ever read before spamming? Yes, Jesuits could not rewrite world history alone, they had help. Anyway, Dr Prof Acad A.Fomenko does not point to jesuits as the driving force of world wide history manipulation in published volumes 1,2,3;, actually he barely mentions the poor devils. Check it with 'Search inside' feature, please. China is rarely mentioned either, in fact, Dr Fomenko is completely eurocentric. Right, his theory contradicts all mainstream schools of history, because in their actual state they are all built on blatantly erroneus chronology. You don't need a mysterious cabal (conspiracy) to falsify history, the falsification is its modus operandi. It is inherent to history(ians) to falsify (distort) events, as it is inherent to humans to boast as it is inherent to power (authority) to legimize itself by referrring to glorious past made to its own order. Dr Prof Fomenko and team have identified scores of instances of such manipulation in Russian, European, etc.. history, and delivered valid statistical proof thereof. His own 'reconstruction' is completely another story. Forget c14 as a valid method of dating. W.Libby has initially discovered a brilliant method of INDEPENDENT dating. Too bad, c14 method has become a joke after a forced marrige with dendrochronology with consensual chronological scale inbuilt. Radiocarbon method can't stand blind tests, but is so very productive as a rubberstamp.
Accepted History & Chronology Must Be Changed. .......2007-04-09
There is no doubt that history as most know it is a sham, & institution's version of History both University & Church is fradulent & inaccurate. Everything was established with an agenda, The real "Dark Ages" are now when we have access to incredible amounts of information past authorities & more important 'common folk' didn't have but our institutions & educators are slow to evolve because of what has ignorantly & arrogantly been taught for too long. This is on many subjects not just Chronology.
For anyone to question "Why would a Mathematician have anything credible to say of History?" The answer is from Dr. Fomenko's preface in the book: "It would be worthwhile to remind the reader that in the XVI-XVII century Chronology was considered to be a subdivision of Mathematics." These volumes could possibly be some of the most important works to date & should be read by everyone with an interest in History, especially professors & educators who have a duty to the public. I have read both books & must say that 'Chronology 1' has some very eye opening & revolutionary information. Even if these volumes are part true the implications are profound & opens the doors to further investigations & questions which must be done. I speak several different lanquages & must say the logic Dr. Fomenko uses with "inflection" of words & words being read from left to right in one region & right to left in another then written backwards, the removal of vowels & get down to basics of words, or different cities & locations having the same name etc. is correct. Vowel usage has always been optional & varied, actually complicating linquistics & study. The first thing one has to understand is that words never had a fixed spelling in history like we do now, the spelling of words was mutable & regional, as well as names & titles of people were vast, varied & changed, NOTHING WAS FIXED or understood linear. Matters of Life & Death as well as financial profiteering yesterday & today were & are made with ignorant, illogical & conspiratorial views of history & reality, it's time people get closer to the Truth & society collectively grow up.
Very Interesting.......2007-03-07
It is a good proposal and I believe it will mature into something even better in the future. I think it deserves to be read.
History as Science Fiction.......2007-01-10
Anatoly Fomenko has written a very intriguing book, full of pictures, charts, and computer 'proof' of his thesis: backwards of AD900 we don't really know what happened or when. Between AD900 and AD1600 there is more certainty, but there is still a lot of fuzzy ground, and things don't get reliable until we get past the 1600's where the printing press made it very difficult for the perpetrators of this timeline manipulation to change anything that had been committed to print. The Dark Ages did not happen. Books were burned for a reason. One organization has doubled the actual length of its existence by expanding the real chronology. Read why.
I had always wondered why Christ died about AD33 and yet men waited until the 11th century to form the Knights Templar, the Cathars, etc and go after the Holy Land by force. Why the 1000 year gap? Turns out there wasn't more than a 10-12 year gap and he proves it using astronomy. This also implies that the planet is not as old as we have been told, and current Christian and other creationist scientists are already championing that idea without being aware of Fomenko's book. The two groups, creationist scientists and the Russian mathematical analysts corroborate each other. Fascinating.
Of course, all this flies in the face of what we have been told traditionally is the 'proper' chronology of western civilization, and most readers will experience 'cognitive dissonance' in reading this book. It means that our history going backwards from AD1600 becomes progressively more incorrect and unreliable until it cannot be trusted at all... in the space of 700-800 years.
Naturally, the curious, open-minded reader will want to know WHO did this, WHY, and did any of the events we think of as really ancient ever happen?
Dr. Fomenko is a respected scientist/mathematician at Moscow State University who has already answered these questions to the satisfaction of his initially skeptical colleagues. Most of them are now believers, a few still refuse to believe (the usual diehards), and of course the western press has ignored Fomenko's work -- for obvious reasons when you read the book. The ones who perpetrated this chronology ruse have a lot to answer for. They are still with us. That's why this book is a well-kept secret.
I gave the book a 4-star rating because I was unable to check out some of his claims; those I checked were as he said. But if even 1/3 of his claims are true, this punches a big hole in what we think is our history, the meaning of western civilization, our educational process (for repeating the ruse as gospel), and the trustworthiness of the organization that perpetrated this ruse, well-intentioned or not.
This book relates to current research into a Young Earth paradigm, to John Keel's discoveries about our planet, and Fr Malachi Martin's insights (in his now out-of-print books). We are indeed sheep who are manipulated and kept ignorant -- for a reason. While knowing what these men have to say may be the "booby prize" (as in: 'what can you do with this knowledge?'), it will provide interesting reading. Didn't someone say: "...and the Truth will set you free."?? For you to judge if this book contains the truth.
Customer Reviews:
Very Interesting.......2007-07-23
Researching within the archives of the Inquisition in northeastern Italy, Ginzburg came across a set of records describing the trials of an obscure miller from the Friuli area. Menocchio, as he was known, repudiated a wide variety of conventional positions on religion, on politics, and even on cosmology. The title of the book reflects Menocchio's unusual and somewhat naturalistic idea about the origin of the universe. In Counter-Reformation Italy, these ideas were not merely unusual, they were regarded as actually dangerous. Following his second trial, in which Menocchio was found to be backsliding, he was executed.
Ginzburg presents Menocchio as an autodidact synthesizing ideas from a variety of sources. Menocchio may have acquired some ideas from Anabaptist radicals who had been active in the Friuli. Other ideas seem to have come from an eclectic, though limited, array of books. As Ginzburg points out, this is an example of the impact of printing. It brought such books as Mandeville's travels and possibly even the Koran into the hands of a lowly miller. Most controversially, Ginzburg argues that many of Menocchio's ideas result from or were influenced by a common European peasant world view whose nature has been largely lost to us. This is an interesting hypothesis which Ginzburg defends very well but it can only be a hypothesis. Neither Ginzburg nor anyone else has the data to evaluate this idea properly. It may be simply that Menocchio was a village crank; an intelligent man with relatively unique ideas.
Regardless of the final interpretation, this well written book provides an interesting view of life in Counter-Reformation Italy.
A rare view into the mind of a 16th century miller.......2007-05-30
It is rare that we can see how common people thought 500+ years ago (another source is the Icelandic Sagas). This book shows that books were read by common people, not just the leaders. In this case, this miller got into a lot of trouble by reading. Lets hope that our current freedom of thought is not restricted in the future.
Microhistory of the masses.......2004-12-13
Borne of the microhistory genre, "The Cheese and the Worms" provides a glimpse into the life of a miller in medieval Italy. No ordinary miller is 'Menocchio', however, as he is inquisitioned for his radical religious philosophies. In a time and place where Catholicism was undoubtedly the religion of Europe, Menocchio harbored unique ideas about religious doctrine, the teachings of the Catholic Church, and man's purpose. Although some of his many ideas contradict others that he had, he was well-read and surprisingly well-educated for a man of his station. As Ginzburg says, though, we must look to the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press as being major catalysts for such learning and religious evolution. Within the microhistory genre, "The Cheese and the Worms" is most fascinating when we ask the question: Was this an isolated phenonmenon or was this a reflection of many people's views? The answer, I suppose, lies with Menocchio, but there is still much to be gleaned from this book.
Well written, fascinating tale.......2002-05-13
Description of a miller with an intresting ('modern') cosmological belief whose rebellion in thought is prosecuted by the Taliban of that time, the Roman Catholic Church. Forced to explain his nonAristotelian views (and, if Ginzburg is telling the truth, he responded extremely well to the inquisitors' questions!), the miller outwits his arrogant, narrow-minded judges and so wins the reward of torture and imprisonment, losing his wife, family, everything in the end. Galileo, who had a higher social position and powerful protectors, suffered no worse than house arrest, in comparison.
Keep this book in mind.......2002-03-04
Anytime you want to tell yourself that the Catholic Church isn't that bad, just keep this book in mind. It is just more proof that the church is the most corrupt institution in the history of time. . .with that in mind. The book is very interesting, it deals with the trial of a smart man at the time who was accused of heresy. So throughout the trial we begin to realize how well read this man is and how well he has developed his ideas. It is a good case study of the life of a common man in 1599.
Book Description
The “dean of Cold War historians” (The New York Times) now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why—from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev. Brilliant, accessible, almost Shakespearean in its drama, The Cold War stands as a triumphant summation of the era that, more than any other, shaped our own.
Customer Reviews:
History in Context.......2007-09-07
I found this book to be an extremely well organized survey of the Cold War. Professor Gaddis eloquently explains the sources of the conflict. He goes on to describe the escalation; and then points out how, somewhere in the middle, many of its actors came to view the conflict as permanent, and even desirable. He explains how it took men and women of vision to see the landscape of the future without the conflict as a permanent fixture, and then relentlessly pursue that vision.
The inclusion of the Soviet perspective from recently available sources makes this book especially interesting. The Soviets were pursuing global communism, which proved to be an unworkable solution to the ills of unbridled capitalism. But, we may never have had such crystal clear historical evidence of its unworkability if the Soviets hadn't undertaken their experiment.
Was the Cold War really dangerous?.......2007-07-17
The year Ronald Reagan died my mom commented to me, "What is all the fuss about Reagan? What did he ever do?" After I wiped the blood from my eyes, I asked her, "You don't speak Russian do you? If nothing else, you can thank him and men like him for that." People tend to forget what a formidable foe the USSR was and how close they came to winning the Cold War. Todays youth have even made the old Russian flag a fashion statement, wearing it on tee-shirts hoping to gain cool points from their hip socialist brainwashed friends. But the fact of the matter is that the Russian Empire was a threat. John Gaddis does an excellent job reminding us of this fact. Although the book is not an in depth study of the cold war, it is useful as a reminder to subsequent generations that the Communist threat was real, in American and throughout the rest of the world.
an excellent concise resource.......2007-06-30
Gaddis has done an excellent job of telling an extremely complicated history in a tight and well-written volume. The importance of his story is contrasted by his reminding the reader that his college students today have almost no living memory of the Cold War or just how serious a historical epic it was between two great powers.
As the world has changed dramatically over the past 16 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, this book will be an excellent resource to remember just what a huge struggle the Western bloc vs. the Soviet Union and its satellites was. This is not an ideaological book from the Yale professor Gaddis, but he gives credit to the end of the Cold War to three individuals and a people group: Ronald Reagan, Margeret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and the people of eastern Europe who contiually stood up to the Soviet and local communist leaders.
A weak point of this book, which admittedly does not have time to explore the vast and complicated expressions of every part of the Cold War is Gaddis explanation for why the anti-war movements of the 1960's and 70's in the West erupted with as much fury as they did, and subsided almost as quickly. His explanation, that it was largely caused by baby boom young adults, coming of age, with lots of time on their hands seems like a short answer. Comparing and contrasting the reaction of the West to the Korean War vs. Vietnam might have made a better use of the text.
Gaddis presentation of how the Cold War started at the end of World War II is another excellent section, especially how the West, making practical concessions to the Soviets that they could never hope to bargain for at the end of the war, quickly turned European opinion against the Soviets by forcing the Soviets into the position of being the ones who built wall, established border police and shut themselves off because they had to keep people in.
The explanation of proxy conflicts, especially in the Middle East, is another highlight of the work. Seeing the Israeli and Palestinian conflict as rump to the Cold War, and the Soviets inability to deal with their Egyptian allies in Nasser further showed the weakness of the Soviet state.
While ultimatley Gaddis presents the end of the Cold War as being led by the four main actors mentioned earlier, his treatment of Gorbachev as a man who managed the end of the failure of the Soviet Empire and the inability of the Soviets to have a sustainable economic future - the very reason for its existence is told with great clarity.
Gaddis warns throughout the book that choosing an ends justifying the means approach got the West into more dificulty than anything else. The attempt by the West, especially between John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, to manage a stable world delayed the inevitable end of the Cold War and more than likely created greater human misery of the likes the world has rarely scene. Ronald Reagan, and Thatcher and John Paul, were in a sense revolutionaries, for they sought to win the Cold War by calling for total peace and not half measures of agreements and stability.
Very Good, Concise History.......2007-05-21
This is ideal if you're not looking for an 14,000 page account of the Cold War...you get a little background on everything, from nuclear tests to Cuba to the fall of the USSR. What you don't get is much detail, which, I suppose, is the intent of a concise history; a little more detail would have been nice, though. It's a 260 page book, a few more facts or stories here and there probably wouldn't have pushed this into "only for historians" territory, it's hard to complain about the brevity of a book whose aim is brevity. 'The Company' by Robert Littel goes well with this, as it fleshes out many of the major events here in a far less dry manner than most Cold War history books. Anybody looking for an overview of one of the largest, longest, most epic events in modern history should pick this up.
Recounting the Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union.......2007-04-19
One of the great debates in American foreign policy is how do you deal with repressive regimes. There are several schools of thought on how to proceed. The first is isolation (this has been the U.S. policy towards Iran and N. Korea). The second is confrontation (Iraq is the obvious example) and the third is communication (this would be the tactic used by Nixon in China and the policy of détente with the Soviet Union). Each policy has its advocates and detractors and each its plusses and minuses. Embracing China has worked out fairly well for its citizenry although there is much room for improvement. On the other hand supporting the Saudi monarchy has caused some serious headaches for the U.S. and Saudi citizens. Isolation and sanctions have a very poor track record and generally makes repressed citizenry even worse off. Confrontation can have unpredictable results that often exasperate the situation. Military confrontation can lead to considerable misery and verbal confrontation generally fails because one of the maxims of maintaining a dictatorship is demonstrating strength. The Bush administrations threats towards Iran and North Korea have fallen flat.
The ethos of `do no harm' fails when deciding how to deal with stable but brutal dictatorships or failing regimes. I was watching Hotel Rwanda with my girlfriend when she asked why the United Nations hadn't done more to protect the Tutsis from genocide. But what could the U.N. do? Slaughter the Hutus? The Tutsis had blood on their own hands. In the case of Bosnia the U.N. and U.S. bombed the hell out of the Serbians but again the Albanians were no angels and had in fact sided with the Axis during WWII. While trying to arrest Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid 18 American soldiers died but so did an estimated 1,000 and 1,500 Somali militiamen with an upwards of 4,000 injured Somali. So when does a humanitarian mission become a slaughter?
In the case of the Soviet Union the people were clearly suffering under a crushingly repressive dictatorship. Despite its claim to being a system of the working man, Communism was an intellectual farce and an economic disaster. It was also a system bent on spreading its message and extending its influence. So the debate in the West was between confrontation and isolation. In the end a compromise of sorts was formed ending in confrontation through proxies. The author gave several examples of countries playing the two superpowers off one another. By not explicitly siding with one or the other smaller countries could manipulate for their own benefit or "wag the dog".
`The Cold War' by John Lewis Gaddis is rather brief for a subject spanning over 40 years of history. The author spends a considerable amount of time discussing the changing nature of war after the invention of the atomic bomb. We all owe a debt of gratitude to leaders on both sides of the iron curtain for showing the wisdom and restraint to not use these horrifying weapons. `The Cold War' chronicles the history of the Soviet Union from Stalin to Yeltzin. In the Soviet Union there was no position high enough that one could be free from danger of removal. There will always be a debate on whether containment was the best solution or whether it was Reagan's confrontation that was the final nail in the coffin. The author clearly favors the style Reagan and Thatcher and pretty much omits the sections on U.S. meddling in South America and the Middle East in the name of containment. Reagan's refusal to use the nonworking SDI as a bargaining chip seems silly in retrospect but it was on his watch that the Soviet Union collapsed and since the world wasn't irradiated I figure he must have done SOMETHING right.
Book Description
In this ground-breaking book, acclaimed author Kati Marton brings to life an unknown chapter of World War II: the tale of nine men who grew up in Budapest's brief Golden Age, then, driven from Hungary by anti-Semitism, fled to the West, especially to the United States, and changed the world. These nine men, each celebrated for individual achievements, were actually part of a unique group who grew up in a time and place that will never come again. It is Marton's extraordinary achievement to trace what for a few dazzling years was common to all of them -- the magic air of Budapest -- and show how their separate lives and careers were, in fact, all shaped by Budapest's lively café life before the darkness closed in.
Marton follows the astonishing lives of four history-changing scientists, all just one step ahead of Hitler's terror state, who helped usher in the nuclear age and the computer (Edward Teller, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner); two major movie myth-makers (Michael Curtiz, who directed Casablanca, and Alexander Korda, who produced The Third Man); two immortal photographers (Robert Capa and Andre Kertesz); and one seminal writer (Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon).
Marton follows these brilliant products of Budapest's Golden Age as they flee fascism in the 1920s and 1930s en route to sanctuary -- and immortality. As the scientists labor in the secret city of Los Alamos in the race to build the atom bomb, Koestler, once a communist agent imprisoned by Franco, writes the most important anticommunist novel of the century. Capa, the first photographer to go ashore on D-Day, later romances Ingrid Bergman and is acknowledged as the world's greatest war photographer before his tragic death in Vietnam. Curtiz not only gives us Casablanca, consistently voted the greatest romantic movie ever made, but also discovers Doris Day and directs James Cagney in the quintessential patriotic film, Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Ultimately, The Great Escape is an American story and an important, previously untold chapter of the tumultuous last century. Yet it is also a poignant story -- in the words of the great historian Fritz Stern, "an evocation of genius in exile . . . an instructive, moving delight." An epilogue relates the journey into exile of three members of the next generation of Budapest exiles: financier-philanthropist George Soros, Intel founder Andy Grove, and 2002 Nobel laureate in literature Imre Kertesz.
Customer Reviews:
Why immigration is good for America.......2007-09-06
Most of the nine Hungarian Jews discussed in this book emmigrated to America and made outstanding contributions to science, mathematics, information technology, and films. Hungary, during its short life of freedom, served as an incubator for intellecutual curiosity. The rise of Nazism forced these great minds to flee there native country and eventually wind up in the U.S.A. Their contributions to the U.S.A. resulted in the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the computer and a branch of mathematics called game theory. The efforts of these immegrants contributed substantially to our victory over both Germany and Japan,
Budapest as the incubator of Greatness.......2007-05-31
The nine men biographied in this book all were born in pre-WWI Budapest when it was the capital of half the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were "double" outsiders being both Jews and Hungarians, estranged from most of the rest of Central Europe and from their own homeland. After WWI and (thankfully) before the beginning of WW2, they all managed to escape. But they didn't escape from Hitler, most when they first left Budapest went to either Berlin or Vienna; they truly escaped from Admiral Horthy and his Arrow Cross, the first fascist government in Europe.
Of the nine, seven made their homes in america and two in england. In England would 'settle' Alexander Korda who was considered the 'only' British film mogul (producer of "The Third Man") who was later knighted. Also Arthur Koestler, ex-communist who would write the Stalin scathing novel "Darkness at Noon" which first brought to light the Gulag and the terror of Communism.
Four of the scientist who came to america ended up the major forces behind the 'Manhattan Project', the H-Bomb (and later design the 'Strategic Defense Initiative') and the first true computer "Eniac". Two others are responsible for many of the most famous photographs ever published (Robert Capa was known as 'the World's Greater War Photo- journalist') in Look, Life and Home & Gardens. The last man, Michael Curtiz, created the look and feel of three of the most famous american movies, "Mildred Pierce" "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and what many consider the greatest (romantic) movie ever made "Casablanca". It was Curtiz who fought with Jack Warner (and won) the battle to use Bogart and Bergman, instead of George Raft and Bette Davis.
At the end, Kati Marton (whose own family escaped from Hungary in 1956 following the abortive revolution), does a phenomenal job of bringing these nine mens lives to life. Her ending snippets about Andrew Grove (of Intel) and George Soros (who gives new meaning to the word Philanthropist) are worth the price of the book alone.
Hungarians love their salami and their Magyars.......2007-03-26
Every anti-semitic Hungarian needs to read this book.
OK, but..........2007-03-20
I found this book quite interesting although not very well written. I am also less than happy with some of choices made by the author - why these nine are featured when some of them (A. Korda, for example) are not in the same league of significance as others. Why were others ignored?
But that was all well until I read that E. Wigner never returned to Hungary late in his life and was never honored there officially. I met Wigner in Budapest in the late seventies on one of his several trips to Hungary and I know that he received numerous acknowledgments there. Among others, he was elected an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. So I wonder, what else is inaccurate in the book?
Budapest's loss is the world's gain..........2007-03-12
Ms Marton is a wonderful writer and her subject matter is close to her heart as she is a transplanted Hungarian, like the subjects of her fascinating tale: "The Great Escape". Marton has focused on nine Hungarians,scientists, film makers and photographers, who fled their homeland because of the country's intolerance to their religion. To a man they went on to make their mark in their respective fields the common thread besides their birthplace, was their everlasting affection for Budapest as one of the subjects stated "Everything I am is because of my experience growing up in Budapest". A very fine read, as a result of the book, I have been looking into travelling to this fabled city .
Book Description
The complete and accurate story of the Beslan School Siege that occurred in Russia on September 1, 2004. This book tells the untold story about the victims, the soldiers who were there and the history of the events leading up to the tragic incident. But more than just the story, this book highlights the lessons America's school system can learn from the tragedy to protect itself from terrorism.
Customer Reviews:
A must read.......2007-05-30
Quite simply this book is a must read for all Americans. It's time to take the blinders off and face the facts presented.
A very good read .......2007-01-15
I got this book from a friend who takes an interest in how our public school system shapes the future of this country. After reading Terror at Beslan I see a few things that have been left out of the list of recommendations on how to cope with the potential for terrorist acts against our children and against our schools. I wonder why Mr. Giduck did not suggest the one thing that would make it extremely hard for terrorists to take large numbers of our children captive. That thing is to REMOVE THE TARGET. Mr. Giduck makes it clear in his book that one of the reasons that terrorist attack schools is because to them they are high value targets. One of the best ways to avoid an attack on a targe however - is to not make yourself a target in the first place.
The great service that Mr. Giduck has done for parents of school age children - and for people who truly care about the way our children are educated in this country is to point out that - along with the myriad of other problems that our public schools have - is that they are aggregating our children in one place, making them easy targets for terrorists motivated enough to carry out the attack. And again - as Mr. Giduck has pointed out - the terrorists are not stupid. They are smart and highly motivated. I have recently read books and writings by John Taylor Gatto and Vin Suprynowicz, both of whom are highly critical of our public schools ability to properly educate our children to make them good citizens of our republic. Both Mr. Gatto and Mr. Suprynowicz have pointed out that the public school system in this country was not designed to make our children into free-thinking individuals, it was designed to mold our childrens minds so that they all have a common - government influenced - way of looking at the world. Putting children all together in the same place removes them from the influence of their parents to a large degree and makes it easier to control the educational materials they are exposed to - thereby controlling the mindset they acquire as they are educated. The growing home schooling movement in this country is a backlash against this influence.
Now it appears that the aggregation of our children in large groups has one more detrimental affect on them - it makes them easy to acquire targets for terrorists who have no regard whatsoever for their lives.
In order to find a truly sustainable solution to the terrorism problem in regards to our educational system that also respects the freedom that we wish to keep for ourselves in this country - as well as producing an educated citizenry we would do well to think outside the box and consider all of
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