In a Len Deighton novel come to life, Whitney (senior European correspondent for The New York Times) tells the engrossing story of the trade in human lives conducted by cold war adversaries in a divided Berlin. After the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, many tried to escape; of these, many were killed but most were captured—often calling upon the services of East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, who quickly became known for winning prisoners their freedom from East German jails, as well as from the country. Beginning with the Rudolf Abel/Francis Gary Powers exchange and peaking with the release of Anatoly Shcharansky, Vogel, working closely with his ``employer,'' the dreaded Stasi, negotiated the release of tens of thousands of political prisoners—but at a price. The Federal Republic of Germany paid out billions of marks over almost three decades, trading spies at border crossings in the dead of night. For his services, Vogel earned hundreds of thousands of marks and gained the respect of Western governments. But, Whitney shows, the lawyer had made a Faustian deal. While saving many East Germans from prison, he also helped bring about the downfall of his government masters, undermining his own future—for each release symbolically chipped away a bit of the Wall, and, in time, the pressure of would-be emigrants overwhelmed the East German government, bringing down Communist Party leader Erich Honecker and then the Wall itself. Some of the credit seems due to Vogel, who negotiated as hard with the Stasi for more releases as he did with the West for more money. Drawing on a great number of interviews, some with Vogel himself, Whitney offers a fascinating new perspective from which to view the rubble of East Germany and the secretive world of cold war spies. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8129-2221-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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