An informative historical summation of CIA memoirs with enough skulduggery to entertain casual readers.
A concise overview of the CIA’s troubled dealings with spies-turned-authors.
For an organization guided by the oft-quoted proverb “the secret of our success is the secret of our success,” the breadth of CIA literature, especially memoirs from former agents, is surprisingly extensive. Moran (U.S. National Security/Univ. of Warwick; Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain, 2013) provides a history of the CIA’s relationship with memoir writers and of the American intelligence community’s approach to public relations. The author points to the publication of Herbert Yardley’s The American Black Chamber in 1931 as a critical moment in the soon-to-emerge genre of U.S. spy memoirs. Years before the founding of the CIA or its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, Yardley’s commercially successful book sparked national security debates by disclosing sensitive cryptographic secrets. In addition, the book “established money as a key motivating factor as to why spies might be tempted to publish.” For several decades after World War II, the CIA adopted a policy of “limited hangout,” which amounted to “hiding as much as possible but occasionally allowing for a carefully controlled blast of publicity executed by its Director.” The Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 effectively ended the CIA’s closemouthed golden age, inspiring a “culture of conspiracy about the CIA” and a flood of “renegades and whistle-blowers” writing embarrassing memoirs. Moran engagingly documents the ensuing crackdown on authors by the CIA, including honeypot schemes, elaborately planted bugs, intimidating surveillance, endless litigation, buying up entire first printings, stealing manuscripts, and the dreaded Publication Review Board. The author demonstrates the truth in one agent’s joke that “on the Agency’s scale of preferential occupations for ex-employees a second career in writing has plummeted to a cut above double agents and a shade below gunrunners.” Moran’s book is scholarly in intent but proves a surprisingly cracking read.
An informative historical summation of CIA memoirs with enough skulduggery to entertain casual readers.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-04713-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
