A mythic figure cut down to size to reveal the self-serving rascal beneath the bon vivant. (Illustrations)
British espionage historian Cook gives a thorough hammering to the outlandish career of a man often considered the archetype of the modern spy.
Credited by Ian Fleming as the inspiration for James Bond, Sidney Reilly was a suave spy, fond of fine living and the lover of too many women to count. This biography starts, appropriately enough, with murder—or rather a likely murder, since the author scrupulously separates fact from conjecture at every stage of a work buttressed by staggering research. In 1898, Cook tells us, Russian émigré Sigmund Rosenblum may have poisoned the husband of his lover, then married her for her money and for the opportunity their union gave him to morph into Sidney Reilly. Cook follows Rosenblum/Reilly’s trail like a hound to the scent, picking up snatches of it here, losing it there, only to find it again. His life was all foggy deception; even this dogged biographer can’t determine exactly where in Russia he was born, or whether it was in 1872, ’73, or ’74. After leaving his homeland, he worked as a patent medicine salesman in London, then in the service of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch tendering information on the Russian émigré community. Though the level of detail can be drowsy-making, Cook’s subject holds the attention. Yes, Reilly served the Secret Intelligence Service, though he may well have spied for the Japanese against the Russians as well. He supplied meat-and-potatoes intelligence for the British, but he was also looking out for himself and the opportunities spying afforded him to live the high life. “Seeking to lay the foundations for an Anglo-American syndicate to invest in a post-Bolshevik economy” led him into deep water and a sting operation, and Reilly’s years as an international operator came to an abrupt end in 1925 with a couple of bullets courtesy of the Russian secret police.
A mythic figure cut down to size to reveal the self-serving rascal beneath the bon vivant. (Illustrations)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7524-2959-0
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Tempus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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