An absorbing study of a remarkably accomplished 20th-century spy.
The rousing tale of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated female spy.
In the span of her long, colorful life, Ursula Kuczynski (1907-2000) rose in the Soviet ranks to the level of colonel and, in her later years, became a novelist and memoirist under the name Ruth Werner. Born to an affluent, left-leaning German Jewish family, she acquired strong communist convictions in her teens. Her career in espionage (code name: Sonya) began in 1930 after she relocated to Shanghai with her first husband, Rudolph Hamburger. In his latest entertaining nonfiction spy thriller, Macintyre tracks Sonya’s numerous audacious exploits during her prolific career. Drawing from her diaries, correspondences, and extensive interviews with her two adult sons, the author crafts a narrative that serves as both an engrossing historical tale and a compassionate portrait of Sonya as a complex woman with distinctly modern sensibilities for her time. Demanding and increasingly risky assignments drove Sonya and her family from Shanghai to Poland, Switzerland, and, eventually, England. Along the way, she became highly skilled at building and operating wireless radio transmitters and also mastered several languages. Her ultimate accomplishment emerged through her correspondence with nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs, transmitting scientific secrets that enabled the Soviets to develop an atomic weapon. Though her conscience was shaken when she eventually grasped the extent of Stalin’s murderous plans, she remained devoted to communist causes. Taking pride in her skills and accomplishments, she was also driven by the thrill of espionage work. “Survival against the odds brings with it an adrenaline high and a sense of destiny from cheating fate,” writes Macintyre, continuing, “as a trained intelligence officer, she would have the opportunity to write her own story in the pages of history. Ursula became a spy for the sake of the proletariat and the revolution; but she also did it for herself, driven by the extraordinary combination of ambition, romance, and adventure that bubbled inside her.”
An absorbing study of a remarkably accomplished 20th-century spy.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13630-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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
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