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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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