This is an extensive book (close to 600 pages) that will change the way you look at polarization with the story of a surprising technology that helped win World War II. While not quite as lengthy as “War and Peace,” but dealing with both topics, the book has many more characters, and certainly more diversity. The phrase “…women and Native Americans” in the title is a throwback to a time when individuals from either demographic were not very likely to be scientists.
The narration starts with a bang―the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor―and moves quickly into the story of a technology many readers might not know. Among other extenuating circumstances of the Pearl Harbor attack, the ability of US troops to accurately shoot down enemy planes was greatly hampered by the lack of a quality optical ring sight (ORS). There are both metaphorical and actual rings of fire in the ORS; they and the people behind them are the title characters of this book.
Covering a period of 15 years in the mid-1900s, the fast-paced text traces the race to develop better gunsights, in all their production aspects, from the mining of the calcite crystals, through problems that arose with the cutting, and into the final assembly and deployment with the troops. The author relies on extensive documentation, including interviews with participants, some collected by previous researchers and some collected personally. He is proud to have captured “stories that have steadily passed from living memories into histories,” with only two of the original sources surviving to see the book published.
Instead of bibliography lists, each chapter ends with a selection of relevant photos (most of them black and white, except for the final chapter, where color technology seems to finally have caught on chronologically). One photo is the iconic “Earthrise” taken from Apollo 8, which was “almost certainly aimed with an ORS,” according to the author. A detailed set of endnotes (close to a fifth of the pages in the book) includes the many works cited, in context.
For the intended audience of those passionate about history (and about technological marvels that influenced history), the last third of the book also includes a treasure trove of archival notes: a list of ORS types and specs, calcite mining production data, a comprehensive index and even a catalog of the artwork reproduced in the book.
Clearly aimed at the history buff, this book would be difficult to use as a textbook or for a technology professional. But the stories of human struggle and triumph—in the mines, in the manufacturing arena and on the military fields—are going to hold the attention and tug at the heartstrings of any reader endowed with either a brain or a heart (or both).
Review by Bogdan Hoanca, University of Alaska Anchorage, USA.
The opinions expressed in the book review section are those of the reviewer and do not necessarily reflect those of OPN or its publisher, Optica