As exciting as any good spy thriller—but it’s all true.
Intelligence researcher Hayes opens the door on the fascinating life of one of England's greatest spies, Daphne Park (1921-2010).
Unlocking that door is an achievement in itself. The author was able to interview her subject after her retirement from the British Secret Intelligence Service after receiving a life peerage to add to her Order of the British Empire award. Of course, given that her life’s work was espionage, the story she told was sparse. Hayes uncovered further information from retired colleagues from Oxford, the British government, SIS, the CIA, and even the KGB. Raised in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) by British parents, she was sent to England for school at age 11 and ended up at Somerville College, Oxford. She left Oxford in 1943 and joined the Special Operations Executive, eventually working with Operation Jedburgh paratroopers until the end of the war. Park had to be patient and extremely persistent in her work, but she succeeded in getting a place in the SIS. She served in Moscow, Congo, Zambia, and Hanoi, as well as three months in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on an unknown operation. She eventually rose to the most senior operational rank in SIS. That list of her assignments is misleadingly simple, as she was always in the right place at the right time: Moscow during the Suez crisis; Leopoldville for the post-colonial face-off in Africa and the murder of Patrice Lumumba; Lusaka for the Rhodesian declaration of independence. Hayes had access to the recent history of England’s secret service, and she uses it to great effect. This is an excellent biography of a remarkable woman who easily built relationships to safeguard foreign policy objectives. She was forthright and obdurate, and she had an infectious sense of humor. Most importantly, she personified the qualities required: loyalty, respect, tradition, and absolute secrecy.
As exciting as any good spy thriller—but it’s all true.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1268-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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