Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Rockets to Russia, October 6, 2009
It's hard to judge this book on its own merits.
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Neil Sheehan's new book about American ballistic missile pioneer Bennie Schreiver, is evocative of past triumphs--both in rocketry and book-length journalism. The development of the Air Force's long-range nuclear missiles during the Cold War has long been obscured by secrecy and bluff and political posturing; still, as a book topic, it seems designed to follow up on Richard Rhodes' highly acclaimed works on the Manhattan project and the subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb. And the structure, wherein Sheehan shines a light on the life and career of a heretofore-unknown subject in order to bring out new shapes and shadows in a familiar historical terrain, calls to mind Sheehan's own magisterial work about Vietnam, "A Bright Shining Lie."
It's difficult to oversell that book, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; one of my journalism professors at Columbia, a member of the Pulitzer committee, called it "one of those rare books that enhances the Pulitzers, rather than the other way around." But that book's massive shadow seems to diminish this well-researched and well-written but comparatively pedestrian work.
Sheehan's subject in "A Bright Shining Lie" was a fascinating Army officer and civilian advisor named John Paul Vann whose distinguished military efforts and dark personal life mirrored the well-meaning public rhetoric and duplicitous behind-the-scenes behavior that characterized America's efforts in the Vietnam War. Bennie Schriever, by comparison, is somewhat flat and uninteresting as a subject for biography. His story has a certain God-mom-apple-pie American simplicity to it; he emigrated to the U.S. from Germany at a young age, worked hard and played a lot of golf, and gained the organizational and bureaucratic skills necessary to get the U.S. Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program going and help the U.S. win the Cold War. Yet there's little sense of Schriever's personal failings; Sheehan mentions family tensions and a divorce almost in passing, and the book ends up feeling more like hagiography than biography.
Consequently, Sheehan ends up looking for conflict not within the man, but between him and a familiar cast of characters--the Neanderthal-minded SAC generals Curtis LeMay and Tommy Powers, who were so famously eager to bomb America's enemies back to the Stone Age. And so, while detailing the various troubles and triumphs Schreiver faced in getting the Air Force's Atlas, Titan and Thor missiles off the launch pad, Sheehan also describes the difficulties he had in arguing against LeMay and an institutional mindset that valued "operators," the bombers they operated, and preventative war far more than it valued the untested deterrent powers of silo-based nuclear missiles.
All of this bureaucratic infighting occurs, of course, against the backdrop of the larger Cold War. Here, Sheehan provides some very insightful history, but when it comes to analysis, he often sacrifices ideological coherency for hindsight-based have-it-both-ways criticism; in his estimation, for instance, the United States was both wrong to stand behind South Vietnam in 1963 and wrong not to stand behind South Korea in 1949. (Many of the references foreshadowing Vietnam felt forced, almost as if Sheehan got worried about writing a puff piece about a Cold Warrior and wanted to buff up his already-shiny Vietnam-dove-street-cred rather than make useful commentary; I felt like pulling a Big Lebowski on him, grabbing him by the shoulders and yelling, "Everything isn't about Vietnam, Walter!")
Still, like rockets, all books must have their proper arc, and Sheehan finds his by guiding his narrative to the most dramatic moment of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Popular history has it that the crisis was a near-triumph of the nuclear-knuckle-draggers, and Sheehan very much focuses on that aspect of it, showing how LeMay and other top Air Force brass pushed for massive airstrikes against Cuba once Khruschev's ploy of stationing missiles there was discovered, and how this probably would have set off World War III. (While still chilling, this is hardly new material; Errol Morris covered the same territory far more interestingly in his documentary "The Fog of War," for instance.) However, like many popular historians, he fails to mention that the crisis was also a logical culmination of the nuclear doctrines espoused by civilians within the Kennedy administration, many of whom bought into the theory of "escalation dominance," whereby the United States would try to perpetually one-up its Soviet adversaries by being willing to use slightly more force than them in any conflict or area of contention. Sheehan could have just as easily blamed the crisis on Robert McNamara as on Curtis LeMay; moreover, he could have just as easily blamed it on his own main character, whose success in developing deployable ICBMs while similar Soviet efforts were blowing up on the launch pads was surely a factor in the Soviet Union's panicked decision to put short-range nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Despite the efforts to hammer history and biography into a familiar ideological mold--one that's been battered by its use on previous, better books on the subject--and despite Sheehan's somewhat annoying tendency here to substitute hypothesis and conjecture when it makes for better imagery than documented fact, this is a decent book, and a relatively enjoyable read. Unlike Schriever's and Sheehan's most famous creations, though, it falls a bit short.
|
|
|
25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent for Cold War history buffs, and for those interested in jet planes., September 24, 2009
A FIERY PEACE IN A COLD WAR by Neil Sheenah is about 506 pages and printed on off-white paper. The book contains 83 chapters. Therefore, even though most of the paragraphs are big chunky things, generally taking up a half page to an entire page, the 83 chapters divide the subject matter, allowing a manageable reading experience.
The book is about General Bernard Adolph Schriever (1910-2005), who was born in Bremen, Germany, and after immigrating to the United States, played a major role in the U.S. Air Force programs for space and ballistic missile research.
The book describes Mr.Schreiver's German-ancestry parents, and attempt to escape from anti-German sentiment by moving to San Antonio, Texas. We learn that Mr.Schreiver's father Adolph perished at the age of 35. "Adolph had his head down inspecting an engine. Someone accidently flipped the starter. The fly wheel fractured his skull . . ."
We learn of Mr.Schreiver's interest in golf, where he "led the field of 54 in the qualifying round to win a pair of golfing shoes from the Broadway Sporting Goods Store and a silver medal from a San Antonio newspaper." The book's early dwelling on golf is not a trivial fact, as golf enabled Mr.Schreiver to hobnob with military brass, and to acquire valuable career connections.
We read that Mr.Schriever attended Texas A & M which, at that time, was all male and was a military school, and that Mr.Schriever was awarded his wings in June 1933.
The first 20 pages or so of this book are simplistic and they read like a book intended for children between the ages of 8-12. But then there is a transition, and after this point we learn about military strategy, leaders in the military, and about various airplanes (advantage and disadvantages of various planes). Also, the book uses the technique where one chapter tells about the general military situation (as might be found in a typical history book about the era) and then returning to the subject of Mr.Schreiver.
We learn that President Roosevelt, in 1934, cancelled air mail contracts with the Post Office and commercial airlines and instead had the Army Air Corps deliver the mail. But this led to a problem, since Army Air Corps planes were ill-equipped to fly in the fog or at night, leading to 66 crashes. This was the spark that led to the modernization of air force. We learn about Boeing's B-17 Flying Fortress, Consolidated's B-29 Liberator, and about Mr.Schreiver's job of flying a commercial route in Montana with a Lockheed Electra 10. We read about World War II, where Mr.Schreiver was part of General MacArthur's attempt to wrest New Guinea from the Japanese, and we learn about tankers at sea that served as "offshore pumping stations to send the fuel in through lines and fill the tanks at bases in time for planes to gas up and take off." (page 45).
The book plunges into little biographies, now and then, and we learn about Major General Sverdrup who ordered a ship to be filled with cement, for construction on the island of Cebu. But the ship was too heavy and got stuck on a coral reef. After the war, Mr.Sverdrup later started Sverdrup & Parcel, an engineering company in St.Louis. But the story about overloading the ship stuck with him (as a running joke).
In one of the chapters that steps back to give the big picture, we learn about the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos. Mostly, we learn about employees at Los Alamos and at other U.S. government research facilities who were Russian spies (e.g., Ted Hall, David Greenglass, Klaus Fuchs, George Koval). We learn the irony that Ted Hall's brother was Ed Hall (Lieutenant Colonel Edward Hall) who was the U.S. Air Force's leading engineer for the American ICBM. Any person who has "an issue" with security checks will change his or her mind after reading this chapter.
The author is to be commended for sticking to the topic, and for not digressing into tempting subjects from the era, such as celebrities (other history books sometimes digress into these topics). Instead of names of celebrities, the book is peppered with names of planes and missiles, e.g., B-17 (p. 131), B-52 (p. 171), MX-774 (p. 212), C-47 transport (p. 271), XSM Experimental StraTegic Missile (p. 317), XSM-68 missile (p. 322), C-124 Globemaster (p. 309), SAC B36 (p. 335), R-12 Soviet ballistic missile (p. 377), FKR cruise missile (p. 441). The author appears knowledgeable, and one is under the impression that he had a chair next to aeronautics engineers, watching them adjust their Pickett slide rules (do you remember slide rules?), and asking questions and taking notes. FIVE STARS.
I also recommend THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Robert Buderi, which concerns radar, and its development in the 1930s, use during World War II, and further development in the Cold War years.
|
|
|
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An old-fashioned history, October 26, 2009
Judged as a history of the US nuclear missile program as it might have been written in the early 1960s, I would place this around the midpoint of the opinions expressed to date. It's easy to read with lots of asides and personal detail of minor characters, short on technical facts and relation to broader events. The main thing I have to add to those reviews is this book will do nothing to help readers under 70 understand why talented, intelligent people in a time of tremendous technological progress, who could reasonably have hoped to cure cancer, eradicate poverty or build the Internet, instead chose to create devices to destroy all life on the planet.
I care less about Bernard Schriever's golf game than, say, whether he visited the survivors of atomic blasts when he was stationed in Japan soon after the bombings. Was he tortured by thoughts of a blasted planet, emptied of life by weapons he created? Did he think a nuclear war was survivable by anyone, and did he think it a topic worthy of research? How did he feel about civilian radiation deaths caused by testing, and the government lies about them? Did he have a clear strategic vision about how his missiles would lead to a better world or did he think that was someone else's department? Did he think the weapons would ever be used and if so, how could he build them, and if not, why devote his life to making them work? If Mutually Assured Destruction justified nuclear weapons, how did he feel about chemical and biological weapons, most of which had no military and no deterrent value? And how about all the energetic, skillful and brilliant people who worked for him?
I mean these questions sincerely. I'm not claiming everyone involved with nuclear weapons was evil or insane, but I would like to know what they were thinking. I find it strange that a book written in 2009, most of whose readers will be too young to recall the times in question, treats total destruction of the Earth as a normal career pursuit that needs no explanation. The author asserts that the weapons kept the peace until the Soviet Union could fall apart, and suggests this proves the wisdom of building them. I can't accept that, the second half of the 20th century was not peaceful and I can imagine far, far better courses of events. Worse courses are imaginable as well, and possibly nuclear missiles prevented them. But even so, I find it exceedingly lucky that the weapons were never fired by technical error, political miscalculation or sabotage; and that the Soviet Union could disintegrate politically without someone deciding to press a button; and that no smaller state or terrorist ever used a weapon; and I don't credit that anyone in 1950 could have been certain enough of that luck to bet everyone's life on it.
I realize that's more than enough on what the book isn't, I have a few things to add about what it is. It is very well-written and does an excellent job of keeping the main thread of the story going through changes in administration and technology. There are some clunker lines like, "The desire for clandestinity was unrequited," scattered throughout. I think this is supposed to be arch humor, but it pops up at inappropriate times.
The level of technical detail is uneven. On one hand, the author defines words like "mufti," so this isn't written for military junkies, but there is no explanation of the relation among the many commands and agencies involved in the story. If you don't know how much weight an assistant secretary of defense pulls versus a two-star general versus an Atomic Energy commissioner, you will have trouble sorting out events. Distances are always stated in both nautical and statute miles (but not tactical miles, what the Navy actually uses for ballistic missiles). Most readers don't care, and most of those that do can translate for themselves. A conversion table in an appendix is more useful than constant translation. Nuclear weapon yields are always given in both tons of TNT and "numbers of Hiroshima's." Neither one is likely to convey much to typical readers, and the second one is used almost exclusively by anti-nuclear writers. It would be far more useful to know how the yield translates into required accuracy for various types of targets, for example a warhead that can destroy a hardened military target if detonated within two kilometers of the site.
This book will not give you insight into the two decades of extraordinary technological and scientific progress that followed the Second World War, but it does give you the names and dates version of an important component of that progress. It comes with enough supporting detail and style to be a pleasant book to read.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Neil Sheehan
by Melvin I. Urofsky
