A sternly narrated account that captures the grim, insular nature of the American security state at its most elite levels.
The story of the men and women who swear to lay down their lives for the president.
Emmett presents himself as the epitome of the Secret Service: patriotic, motivated and self-serious; his intention here is to “[capture] the unique culture of the organization.” Following an officer’s commission in the Marines, he secured entry into the Secret Service through sheer persistence, fulfilling a childhood dream rooted in the traumatic memory of the Kennedy assassination. He even married a fellow agent, with whom he has a combined 42 years of service. Although all agents customarily spend several years investigating crimes like check fraud, Emmett pushed for a transfer to the Counter Assault Team, the counterterrorism unit that follows the presidential motorcade: “Of all the agents in the Secret Service,” he writes, “these men’s motives for being there were perhaps the purest of all.” With CAT, Emmett was on unusual high-risk protective missions, such as going to Haiti with Vice President Dan Quayle. Yet the author claims the unit’s unique capabilities went unappreciated by the agency’s meddlesome upper management, a consistent theme throughout the book. Following CAT, Emmett moved to the Presidential Protective Division. Emmett clearly presents the logistics, training and equipment that comprise the PPD agent’s working life, testifying to the long hours and physical privations beneath the glamour. However, he’s clearly unwilling to tell tales out of school about presidents George Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, all of whom he personally protected (although he discusses the security nightmare created by Clinton’s love of jogging), and too often the narrative is generalized and anecdotal rather than specific. Emmett’s personalized perspective is that of a martinet, generally scornful toward those he encounters (excepting presidents, Marines and fellow agents) and frequently complaining about “political correctness” and media scrutiny compromising the Secret Service.
A sternly narrated account that captures the grim, insular nature of the American security state at its most elite levels.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04471-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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