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 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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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