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摘要
摘要
From Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic "A Bright Shining Lie," comes the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changes history--and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who leads the high-stakes effort.
评论 (3)
出版社周刊评论
The military-industrial complex proves an unlikely arena for plucky individualism in this history of the men who built America's intercontinental ballistic missile program in the 1950s and '60s. Sheehan paints air force Gen. Bernard Schriever and his colorful band of military aides, civilian patrons, defense intellectuals and aerospace entrepreneurs as a guerrilla insurgency fighting Pentagon red tape, and a hostile air force brass, led by Strategic Air Command honcho Curtis LeMay, who advocated megatonnage bomber planes over ICBMs. Sheehan gives a fascinating run-down of the engineering challenges posed by nuclear missiles, but the main action consists of bureaucratic intrigues, procurement innovations and epic briefings that catch the president's ear and open the funding spigots. Like the author's Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning A Bright Shining Lie, this is a saga of underdog visionaries struggling to redirect a misguided military juggernaut, this time successfully: the author credits Schriever's missiles with keeping the peace and jump-starting the space program and satellite industry. Sheehan's focus on personal initiative and human-scale dramas lends an overly romantic cast to his study of cold war policy making and the arms race, but it makes for an engrossing read. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Oct. 6) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
A Pulitzer Prizewinning author chronicles the Soviet-American arms race through the life story of the man who was indispensable to the creation of the intercontinental ballistic missile. By 1951 Air Force legend Curtis LeMay's Strategic Air Command had encircled the Soviet empire and served as the centerpiece of America's military-defense strategy. Still, LeMay's bomber strike force was already being undermined by innovations spurred by the postWorld War II vision of General Hap Arnold, who looked to a then-obscure colonel, Bernard Schriever, to carry forward his vision of an Air Force more reliant on science and brains than on combat courage. Sheehan (After the War Was Over: Hanoi and Saigon, 1993, etc.) charts Schriever's career from his Texas boyhood to his WWII service, where he specialized in maintenance and aeronautical engineering. Following the war and responding to Arnold's call, Schriever punched the tickets necessary for a fast-rising officer, all the while developing his expertise in radar, rocketry and nuclear weaponry. Just as with his Pulitzer- and National Book Awardwinning A Bright Shining Lie (1988), Sheehan uses the career of one man as a window into a larger, more complex story, in this case the Cold War arms race. The wide-ranging narrative covers the postwar Allied scramble to gather up German rocket scientists, Stalin's A-bomb program, the pervasive espionage that helped speed up the Soviet push for parity, America's Cold War politics and diplomacy and many intriguing profiles of scientists, politicians, contractors and military men who played critical roles in helping, or occasionally hindering, Schriever fight the bureaucratic battles necessary to develop the ICBM. With a reporter's respect for fact, a historian's care for context and a novelist's attention to narrative flow, Sheehan transforms an otherwise arcane topic into a must-read for any citizen interested in how and why the country assembled a deadly arsenal designed to prevent another Pearl Harbor and make nuclear war unthinkable. Simply outstanding. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
Air Force general Bernard Schriever's most important work was on the development of the inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM). The story of Schriever and the ICBM is as much about the rivalry between the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force as it is about the Cold War. At times it seems that Schriever and his air force associates feared the Soviets-but really hated the army. Schriever also had to navigate the rivalries between military contractors and superior officers within his own service branch. While a tale of bureaucratic wrangling could very easily be boring, Pulitzer Prize winner Sheehan (A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam) has made this work exciting by weaving in fascinating personal stories of the individuals involved as well as lucid snapshots of Cold War politics. The climax is his brief synopsis of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the weapons Schriever helped develop came to being deployed. VERDICT Highly accessible to lay readers, this book is for anyone interested in learning how the military industrial complex worked during the Cold War. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/09.]-Michael Farrell, Reformed Theological Seminary, Oviedo, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.