A crack biography of a man who was a preposterous enigma.
A biography of “the most complex and enigmatic of the Cambridge Spies,” a group of men recruited during the 1930s to spy for the Soviet Union.
Guy Burgess (1911-1963) was well-born, well-educated, intelligent, and completely spoiled. Through his days at the Royal Naval College, Eton, and Cambridge, he fought to be accepted and, failing that, turned to outraging the bourgeois. In the 1930s, Cambridge was an intellectual maelstrom, and students felt that their generation had to do something significant. Through societies such as the Apostles and the Cambridge University Socialist Society, the lure of communism provided an answer. Leaving school, many then got on with life, but Burgess and at least four of his friends ended up spying for the communists. His antics are legion, his drunkenness unceasing. The book is full of dramatically opposing visions of his personality, but one element that all agree on was his brilliance. Politics, sex, and gossip were Burgess’ main interests, all easily fed by his work at the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5, and MI6. Also well-fed were his Russian controllers, to whom he transmitted thousands of documents. In fact, he gave the Russians so many documents that many were never translated, decoded, or read. But Burgess was politically naïve, ignoring the failures of communism’s purges and communes. In this entertaining biography, literary agent Lownie (The Edinburgh Literary Companion, 2005, etc.) gives the impression that spying was almost a game for Burgess; deceit was integral to his life. At the same time, he was upfront about his homosexuality and, when drunk, often spoke of working for the Russians. He was never monogamous, cruel to his lovers, a natural liar, manipulative, louche, and slovenly, and he always did just what he wanted. He never had boundaries as a child, and even his mother said perhaps the Russian discipline might be good for him. Lownie amply demonstrates Burgess’ wily intelligence in navigating the spy’s life while often living so indiscreetly.
A crack biography of a man who was a preposterous enigma.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-10099-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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
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