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 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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