Category: Activities (Page 10 of 33)

Kirkus Reviews: A glowing biography of the famously cautious yet effective chancellor of Germany.

Marton, A Hungarian-born American foreign correspondent, clearly admires Angela Merkel (b. 1954), who has served as chancellor since 2005 and was hailed in a 2020 Pew Research poll as “the world’s most trusted leader, regardless of gender.” The author marvels especially at Merkel’s early years in East Germany, where her pastor father joined the call to serve the socialist East by moving his family from Hamburg to the rural hamlet of Templin, in the heart of the Soviet-occupied Democratic Republic of Germany. Indoctrinated in school, sealed off from the West by border walls in 1961, and spied on by her neighbors for the state security police, Merkel toed the line and kept a low profile while excelling at physics, first in Leipzig and then in East Berlin. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, she embraced a new profession: politics. When the East German DA party merged with the West German CDU, she became the mentee of the powerful Helmut Kohl. Working her way steadily up the ranks, Merkel ultimately assumed leadership of her party after Kohl left office. Unglamorous by choice, workmanlike to a fault, and used to sidestepping male egos, Merkel proved herself to be a deft civil servant and leader, especially in opening Germany’s borders to refugees in 2015 despite the backlash. “Her political rise,” writes Marton, “would be fueled by self-control, strategic thinking, and, when necessary, passive aggression.” Merkel’s determination to bolster Europe’s cohesion with French president Emmanuel Macron’s help and to strengthen ties between Europe and the U.S., despite opposition and/or apathy from the Trump administration, form her lasting legacy. Though the text is somewhat short on criticism, Marton clearly knows her subject and writes smoothly, pulling back the curtain on an enigmatic, significant world figure.

A human portrait more than a political one that amply captures the essence of a moral, determined leader.

Thank you all for including me in such learned conversation! It shows your knowledge and your affinity to my Heimat (word is explained in the book), and I am truly moved!

An up-close account of the otherworldly trajectory of tech magnate Elon Musk.

Ars Technica editor Berger opens with a telling scene set in South Texas in late September 2019, when Musk visited a factory building a rocket that one day will be bound for Mars. Sending that ship—and people—to the red planet is of a parcel with Musk’s pioneering work in “remaking the global aerospace industry,” which includes privatizing efforts that had long belonged to government agencies such as NASA—which, though funded to the tune of some $25 billion per year, still “remains several giant leaps away from sending a few astronauts to Mars.” Getting the SpaceX rocket safely to distant Mars “may not work,” Musk confessed before adding, “But it probably will.” By Berger’s swiftly moving account, it will, not just because Musk is an endlessly driven, intensely focused sort who could use a little more fun in life—at one point, Musk ruefully allows that “it wouldn’t have hurt to have just one cocktail on the damn beach” of a distant Pacific atoll used in test flights—but also because Musk is surrounded by brilliant scientists recruited from academia and industry who are thoroughly invested in the project’s success. “They want that golden ticket for the world’s greatest thrill ride,” Berger writes, evoking another obsessed genius, Willie Wonka. Musk now leads not just SpaceX, but also the Tesla electric automobile company as well as a neural technology company and a firm devoted to digging new transportation tunnels below overcrowded cities. Even so, he remains closely attentive to matters that aviation engineers have often overlooked, such as recycling rocket stages: “If an airline discarded a 747 jet after every transcontinental flight,” writes the author, “passengers would have to pay $1 million for a ticket.”

Readers interested in business and entrepreneurship, as well as outer space, will find Berger’s book irresistible.

The Great Halifax Explosion : a World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author, a gripping narrative-nonfiction account of the world’s largest manmade explosion before the atomic bomb. In December 1917, a freighter carrying 3,000 tons of explosives sailed from Brooklyn bound for the trenches of World War I—en route, a cataclysmic disaster awaited . . .

Entering World War I’s fourth demoralizing year, the Allies hoped to break the grueling stalemate by sending thousands of fresh American troops and more munitions than ever to the trenches of France. Before the French freighter Mont-Blanc set sail from Brooklyn on December 1, 1917, with a staggering 3,000 tons of explosives, the captain banned his crew from lighting a single match, and secured the volatile cargo with copper nails because they don’t spark when struck.

For four harrowing days, the floating powder keg bobbed up the Eastern seaboard, plowing through a wicked snowstorm and waters infested with German U-Boats, which had already torpedoed a thousand Allied ships that year alone. On December 6, the exhausted crew finally slipped into Halifax Harbour—just as the relief ship Imo was rushing to leave. At 8:45 a.m., the Imo struck the Mont-Blanc’s bow, knocking over barrels of airplane fuel. Fire swept across the decks, sending the Mont-Blanc’s crew scurrying to their lifeboats, while Halifax longshoremen, office workers, and schoolchildren walked down to watch it burn.

At 9:04:35 a.m., the Mont-Blanc erupted, leveling 2.5 square miles of Halifax, killing 2,000 people, and wounding 9,000 more—all in one-fifteenth of a second.

In this definitive account, bestselling author John U. Bacon recreates the recklessness that caused the tragedy, the selfless rescue efforts that saved thousands, and the inspiring resilience that rebuilt the town. Just hours after the explosion, Boston alone sent 100 doctors, 300 nurses, and a million dollars. The explosion would revolutionize ophthalmology and pediatrics; transform Canada and the U.S. from adversaries to allies; and show J. Robert Oppenheimer, who studied Halifax closely, how much destruction an atomic bomb could inflict on a city.

Bacon brings to light one of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century, exploring the long shadow the world’s first “weapon of mass destruction” still casts on our world today.