A harrowing thriller in which a young woman’s “joy of sacrifice” turned to tragedy.
A singular World War II tale highlights the bravery of a Sufi mystic’s daughter who sacrificed a peaceful life in France to become a secret agent for the British during the war.
Magida fashions a highly original biography of the short, brave life of Noor Inayat Khan (1914-1944), who became a radio operator for the British in her late 20s and was dropped into France as a spy in the summer of 1943. It is a sad and harrowing story of a young woman with a steely will and strong sense of family honor who was eagerly incorporated into wartime service by the British Special Operations Executive, perhaps due to her mixed upbringing and perfect French—even though one official noted that she was “sensitive, somewhat dreamy.” Magida spends a substantial, fascinating portion of the narrative exploring Khan’s unusual upbringing in the suburbs of Paris, where her father, a renowned Indian-born Sufi mystic teacher and musician, taught his international pupils and disciples. Noor’s mother, Ora, was the sister of the notorious self-styled yogi Pierre Bernard. By the author’s account, Noor’s upbringing was spiritually oriented, literary, and sheltered, and the family was uprooted when her father died. Noor, who trained as a musician as well, was closest to her mother and younger brother, Vilayat. Joining the exodus to England when the Nazis invaded in June 1940, the siblings, nonviolent rather than pacifist, had to decide how best to aid the war effort. Noor enlisted and trained in wireless telegraphy. While courageous, “direct…forthright and no pushover,” and “used to being underestimated,” Noor (spy name Madeleine) unfortunately disregarded some important rules of the secret agent, such as not contacting anyone she had known before the war, and her movements caught the attention of the Gestapo. She was imprisoned and eventually executed at Dachau.
A harrowing thriller in which a young woman’s “joy of sacrifice” turned to tragedy. (37 illustrations)Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-63518-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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