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 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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