Absorbing niche history about a grandfather’s secret Nazi identity.
A spy’s granddaughter tells her story.
The is the first book by journalist Kuehn, born and raised in the U.S., who only learned the story in 1994 when a screenwriter, researching a World War II script, wrote to ask help in locating her father, Eberhard Kuehn. Shocked, she hurried to a local bookstore, where several histories revealed that Eberhard’s father, Otto, was a Nazi intelligence agent sent with his family to Honolulu to spy in 1935. Paid generously by the Japanese, he rented a house overlooking Pearl Harbor and gathered information on the ships and defenses. The author’s father, born in 1926, was a boy during this time. No professional, Otto spent money wildly despite having no obvious source of income, visiting Japan and the local Japanese consulate regularly (often when his money failed to arrive). His wife and daughter spied with more good sense. All this quickly caught the attention of neighbors as well as the FBI, who, aided by a small army of informers, kept a close watch on them. Otto was arrested and sentenced to death after the attack of Dec. 7, 1941; the sentence was commuted, and he was deported after the war. His wife and daughter were never tried but interned and then deported. Eberhard, now of college age, refused to join them and concealed his family history until pressed by his daughter. Japanese from the local consulate also spied, and scholars still debate the value of all this intelligence, although fringe writers happily describe light signals from the Kuehns’ dormer window directing Japanese planes to their Pearl Harbor targets. Despite the impression given by Hollywood, Nazi spies were largely ineffective, and their efforts in Hawaii do not contravene this.
Absorbing niche history about a grandfather’s secret Nazi identity.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250344465
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.
A New Jersey senator’s moral manifesto.
Booker situates his narrative in the wake of his 2025 record-breaking 25-hour stand on the Senate floor, an act of physical endurance and moral insistence that serves as its animating example. Though not framed as memoir, the episode implicitly positions Booker himself as a model of the virtues he argues are essential to democratic life. Organized around 10 qualities, including agency, vulnerability, truth, perseverance, and grace, the book advances a clear thesis. “In this book, I argue that many Americans who came before us, and many among us today, have consistently proven that virtues are practical: They expand our power, deepen our sense of belonging, and equip us to endure and ultimately prevail.” Booker illustrates this claim through figures such as the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, whose willingness to endure sacrifice for principle anchors the book’s moral lineage, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose composure under public scrutiny is presented as an example of dignity as civic strength. These portraits reinforce Booker’s belief that character, sustained over time, can shape public life, even when political outcomes remain uncertain or incomplete. He supplements these examples with personal stories drawn from family, faith, and community, delivered with emotional conviction and a tone that remains affirming and carefully calibrated. Much of the narrative reads like an expansive commencement address, earnest and reassuring, offering moral affirmation at moments when readers might reasonably expect sharper confrontation. That rhetorical choice ultimately defines the book’s limits. Booker acknowledges political conflict and compromise, but rarely examines them in depth, and while urging leaders to take moral risks, he avoids sustained reflection on how some of his own political decisions have tested the virtues he promotes. The result is a principled but self-conscious work that affirms shared values while offering little guidance for navigating power and accountability.
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781250436733
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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