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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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