A gripping espionage yarn that happily contradicts the authors’ advice for crafting a cover story: “Make it boring as hell.”
A fast-paced account of an effort to root out a mole and recruit double agents in an unnamed enemy nation.
Owing to CIA censorship, the Bustamantes, married former agents, can’t name the country on which this narrative centers. “But we can tell you,” they write, “that it’s a place with centuries of history, a vibrant culture, a wonderful people…and a government implacably opposed to the United States and its allies.” Given that the country would appear to be European and mildly prosperous, one might make an educated guess, but that’s not really important. What is important is that the country they call Falcon had an intelligence service so highly developed that traditional methods of spycraft were hobbled, leading to a brilliant solution: Decentralize their spy network so that it resembled a terrorist cell, with each member holding only need-to-know information. On that score, one of the most exciting episodes in a book full of them is Andrew’s skin-of-his-teeth escape from Falcon after almost certainly having been betrayed by an American agent code-named Scimitar, who did so for the oldest reason there is: He needed money. The adventures and misadventures are plentiful here, but of equally great interest to readers are the authors’ lucid explanations of how spycraft proceeds to begin with. In the business of recruiting well-connected Falconians to spill state secrets, for instance, the first step is to gain the subject’s attention more or less accidentally, and then turn up at the same coffee shop or store and, in time, strike up a conversation. Phrase three? Forge a true friendship, a particularly American approach. “Most of the time, the relationships between our case officers and their Falcon contacts are genuine—not fake or transactional.” It’s just the thing for a budding spy to learn.
A gripping espionage yarn that happily contradicts the authors’ advice for crafting a cover story: “Make it boring as hell.”Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780316572149
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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