A compelling, immersive memoir of crime, punishment, and the redemptive qualities of love and atonement.
A cathartic memoir retracing the lives of the real men behind The Falcon and the Snowman espionage chronicle and the 1985 movie it inspired.
A trio of authors contributes to this historical narrative, which charts the later lives of falconer Christopher Boyce and his boyhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee, both of whom were convicted of delivering classified government documents to the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s. In the introduction, co-author Boyce, “far older than my sixty years,” offers his own first-person version of the events, including his treachery and “self-destructive descent into hell” after working at the National Security Agency and learning of duplicitous governmental actions against an international ally. He then explains how he was caught and sentenced to 40 years in prison (Lee received a life sentence). As compelling as this intimate opening treatment is, the remainder of the book is curiously dictated from the alternating perspectives of both Christopher and Cait Boyce beginning in 2005 and, via a meandering timeline, culminates with a where-are-they-now epilogue and a generous photo gallery. In vivid chapters brimming with immediate, unfettered narration, Boyce and wife Cait share the stories of their lives pre- and post-conviction. Readers learn the fascinating, intricately plotted details of Boyce’s daring escape from Lompoc Federal Penitentiary in 1980, his intention to fly in and break Lee out by helicopter, his recapture, and the horrifically violent and dehumanizing prison conditions he endured while locked away in a “concrete womb.” Boyce also interjects passionate testimony from his days as a security communications engineer as well as the reasons he betrayed the nation. His prison release in 2002 was orchestrated with Cait’s determined efforts, even though she initially only set out to achieve parole for Lee. Cait ended up triumphantly freeing both men and falling in love with Boyce as well, despite her devastating cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment. Fans of true crime will be riveted by the ultimate destinies of both men, though Lee’s journey isn’t afforded the same scrutiny as Boyce’s.
A compelling, immersive memoir of crime, punishment, and the redemptive qualities of love and atonement.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9915342-1-0
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Vince Font, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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