A fascinating chronicle of a largely unappreciated detail of The War.
This cinematic tale of World War II espionage is a one-man spy-versus-spy thriller—spying on behalf of both Britain and the Nazis was the same dashing rascal.
Eddie Chapman, born in a small English village in 1914, was known to his German intelligence handlers as “Little Fritz.” To his British MI5 controllers, he was “ZigZag,” and he was a fearless hero, a womanizing rogue and a thief. The cheeky fellow started his career as a safecracker pursued by Scotland Yard before he joined the Coldstream Guards. Then came the war and, fresh from a Parisian prison (where he enjoyed erotic assignations with female inmates), he was recruited for the Führer’s service. Under the supervision of a jolly spymaster, he learned how to parachute at night as well as the arcane arts of hidden writing, clandestine radio communication and explosive detonation. When he was dropped into the English countryside, however, he reported directly to His Majesty’s Secret Service. Because the Nazi’s Enigma code had been cracked, he or someone much like him was expected. As stipulated by a formal contract with the Abwehr, he was to demolish an aircraft factory. The destruction was cleverly faked by film studio artists, and back to the Germans went the double agent to much praise and further assignments. He was to sink a British freighter; he was to report on the effectiveness of the new buzz bombs. For false information, Little Fritz received the Iron Cross. In Berlin in 1944, he saw how the war was going and soon returned home and retired by MI5. Years later, the old English agent recalled meeting Hitler. After a botched attempt by others at a movie of his romantic exploits, ZigZag died peacefully in 1997. Booth offers a wonderful spy story based chiefly on Chapman’s memoirs, his widow’s recollections and, best of all, on files recently freed under Britain’s Official Secrets Act. (Chapman’s story is so good that a similar book, Agent ZigZag, by Ben Macintyre, will be published by Harmony Books in October 2007.)
A fascinating chronicle of a largely unappreciated detail of The War.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-55970-860-9
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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