A chilling real-world espionage yarn.
The unsettling tale of Bob Levinson, a private investigator gone missing in Iran.
New York Times reporter Meier (Pain Killer: A "Wonder" Drug's Trail of Addiction and Death, 2003, etc.) does admirable work in tying together the threads around Levinson’s 2007 disappearance, which has received sporadic coverage alongside the thorny relationship between the United States and Iran. For years, writes the author, “the explanation that U.S. government officials were giving out publicly to explain Bob’s reason for visiting Iran wasn’t true.” Levinson, a retired FBI agent with a large family, was supplementing his income as an international corporate investigator focused on product counterfeiting by marketing information to the CIA’s Illicit Finance Group. His handlers, who would deny the relationship after the disappearance, greatly valued his raw intelligence: “A ‘gold mine,’ that’s what the CIA was calling him.” Traveling to an Iranian coastal island to meet with a notorious American fugitive, Levinson’s disappearance escalated into a diplomatic morass, with the FBI reluctantly investigating the CIA’s initial obfuscation and Levinson’s grieving family and friends making their own inquiries. The prevailing assumption was that Levinson was seized by Iranian intelligence, whose “agencies believed there was no such thing as a retired FBI agent.” Throughout the book, the case takes dramatic turns, including a tense meeting between Levinson’s wife and the Iranian U.N. ambassador; the censure of his handlers, “the strongest disciplinary actions taken by the agency in decades”; and the scandal from the exposure of the agency’s role. However, Levinson remained out of reach. Meier constructs a clear narrative that still becomes convoluted, as individuals from the U.S., Europe, and Iran insert themselves and their shady motivations into the mystery. He relies heavily on written communications between Levinson, his friends and handlers, and his pursuers, which adds documentation but also slackens the pace.
A chilling real-world espionage yarn.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-21045-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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 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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