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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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