For Bond fans and true-crime buffs, especially, a leisurely excursion into the early days of modern espionage.
A beat cop makes good, and anarchists quake.
Say “M” in the context of British intelligence, and you’re likely to conjure up an image of the avuncular but death-dealing Bernard Lee, late of the first James Bond films. Whereas that M was a deep-background type, holed up in an underground lab, the eponymous M, an Irish cop named William Melville, enjoyed being known and seen. He had been admitted into the London Metropolitan Police “as PC 310 to the register of E Division (Bow Street and Holborn) on 16 September 1872,” as intelligence analyst Cook (Ace of Spies, 2004, etc.) briskly writes, but was promptly dismissed for insubordination in an effort by management to crush collective bargaining. Soon rehired, he climbed through the ranks, progressing from busting shoplifters and errant milkmen and tram conductors to chasing down foreign terrorists. These were numerous in the days of Victoria, and particularly in the time of her jubilee, when “Irish Invincibles” and other bad apples were busily blowing things English into smithereens. Stationed across the Channel, Melville returned home at about the time London-based detectives were being pilloried for letting Jack the Ripper slip through their fingers. Unblemished, he spent his time trying to infiltrate various “nihilist” gangs of the kind who fill the pages of Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent; his expertise at mounting clandestine operations soon won him favor among the brass, though the anarchists were not at all happy, for they were “trailed by police close as sheepdogs,” as one Paris newspaper put it. The struggles between Melville and his many enemies acquired a kind of mythic gloss, and, Cook notes, “it is no coincidence that this period sees the first success of the detective novel.” Melville’s subsequent work as organizer of an allied military and police intelligence network was field-tested in the Boer War, but especially in WWI, when MI5 came into its own, and it was found to fill the bill.
For Bond fans and true-crime buffs, especially, a leisurely excursion into the early days of modern espionage.Pub Date: July 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-7524-2896-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tempus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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