The retired, highly decorated chief of disguise for the CIA highlights his adventurous 25-year career. Mendez is not modest about his considerable accomplishments. He takes credit for “creating and deploying many of the most innovative techniques in the espionage trade.” And the remainder of this book (vetted by the agency) is, in one sense, a justification of that claim. In 1965 the author began with the agency as a low-level technician—essentially a graphic artist who specialized in forging documents. Gradually—through a combination of skill, pluck, luck, diligence, and ambition—he rose through the agency hierarchy, eventually participating in dazzling cloak-and-dagger operations in some of the world most exotic and dangerous locations: southeast Asia, the Soviet Union, Iran. The most interesting sections describe his endeavors in the mid-1970s to generate techniques to cope with the umbrageous KGB surveillance of American operatives in Moscow and his gripping account (untold in full until now) of the CIA’s role in “exfiltrating” (removing) six Americans from Tehran during the hostage crisis in 1980. Oddly, Mendez and McConnell elect to record about halfway through the book his “flawless” record of 150 successful exfiltrations; this effectively removes from his subsequent accounts of such actions all vestiges of suspense—a weird decision, to say the least. Another narrative annoyance is the decision to begin many of the subsections of the book with paragraphs that sound as if they were lifted from, well, bad spy novels. For example: “—This guy is going south on us, fast,’ the Chief of Station, “Simon,’ explained, leaning over his desk and speaking with a crisp but gentle precision that was barely audible above the chugging air conditioners.” Nonetheless, the coauthors convey with clarity something of this shadow world which requires of its inhabitants hard work, strong stomachs, low blood pressure, and a full measure of creative improvisation. A swift, engrossing summary of a life and a way of life. (8 pages photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16302-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
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