First-rate reading for fans of cloak-and-dagger stuff, and for students of WWII history.
A lively recounting of America’s shadow war against the Axis powers, fraught with peril, treachery, and bad decisions.
William J. Donovan, a distinguished hero of the Great War, fought an uphill battle to establish a military intelligence unit that worked across service and agency boundaries, but he was vindicated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the aftermath, “Wild Bill’s” fledgling unit was put under the authority of the Joint Chiefs, though given considerable leeway; Donovan used his relative freedom to emphasize an “integrated ‘combined arms’ of shadow war techniques” and to otherwise sharpen the Office of Strategic Service’s skills in the fine arts of “persuasion, penetration and intimidation.” Among OSS’s specialties was a refined understanding of military logistics: its “bespectacled economists, historians, political scientists, and historians” were able to glean considerable intelligence from raw reports and economic data, making the first accurate estimates of such things as German tank production and orders of battle. But, as O’Donnell (Beyond Valor, 2001) writes, drawing on vivid oral histories by unit veterans, OSS types were not all bookworms; hundreds performed heroic and unlikely deeds behind enemy lines, organizing partisan resistance, committing acts of sabotage, and gathering critically important intelligence. One not untypical operative, writes O’Donnell, was a Russian prince who “emigrated to the United States, married an Astor, and became vice president of Hilton International”—and who helped organize the Allied invasion of Sardinia. OSS had its failings, O’Donnell acknowledges, especially in the Pacific Theater and in the Balkans, where operatives missed opportunities to land in Istria and arrive in Vienna before the Soviets—which would have changed the postwar era considerably. Even so, O’Donnell believes, the OSS did well to gather intelligence about the Soviets as well as the Axis, and in the end, he observes, OSS “may have made its greatest contribution, not to winning World War Two, but to winning the Cold War.”
First-rate reading for fans of cloak-and-dagger stuff, and for students of WWII history.Pub Date: March 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3572-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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