Nation Washington editor Corn delves thoroughly and with gusto into the career of Ted Shackley, one of the more shadowy CIA agents of the Cold War period. Shackley was the child of a broken home, son of an immigrant woman who bequeathed him his fluent Polish, a skill that landed him his first counterintelligence job in postwar Berlin. An intense but informed and intelligent patriot, he entered the CIA at its inception in 1947. His career, therefore, mirrors the development and fortunes of the agency itself. Shackley was in Miami to orchestrate assassination attempts on Castro; he was in Laos to organize the covert war against the Pathet Lao; he was in Vietnam, where, from his office in the Saigon embassy as chief of the East Asia Division, he earned the nickname ``Blond Ghost.'' (In 1975, back in the States, as he watched TV images of the embassy evacuation, his 11-year-old daughter found him weeping—a rare moment of emotion for a man portrayed here as cold, balanced, and ruthless.) Corn sounds a note of recrimination throughout this biography, which somewhat unfairly lays at Shackley's door such fiascos as the posting by an agency employee of a CIA-forged letter from a Thai Communist rebel to the Thai government in an attempt to foster divisions within that country's left (it was traced back to the CIA and caused a storm of anti-American protest in Thailand). The book might have benefited from the perspective of Shackley himself, who did not consent to be interviewed. By his own admission, Corn has used Shackley's career to open a window into the world of intelligence, and his book succeeds more as an account of the CIA's workings in general than as a portrait of one agent. A fairly absorbing read about the CIA, though the special significance of its protagonist isn't really established.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-69525-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and...
An enchanting plea by the award-winning Nigerian novelist to channel anger about gender inequality into positive change.
Employing personal experience in her examination of “the specific and particular problem of gender,” National Book Critics Circle winner Adichie (Americanah, 2013, etc.) gently and effectively brings the argument about whether feminism is still relevant to an accessible level for all readers. An edited version of a 2012 TEDxEuston talk she delivered, this brief essay moves from the personal to the general. The author discusses how she was treated as a second-class citizen back home in Nigeria (walking into a hotel and being taken for a sex worker; shut out of even family meetings, in which only the male members participate) and suggests new ways of socialization for both girls and boys (e.g., teaching both to cook). Adichie assumes most of her readers are like her “brilliant, progressive” friend Louis, who insists that women were discriminated against in the past but that “[e]verything is fine now for women.” Yet when actively confronted by an instance of gender bias—the parking attendant thanked Louis for the tip, although Adichie had been the one to give it—Louis had to recognize that men still don’t recognize a woman’s full equality in society. The example from her childhood at school in Nigeria is perhaps the most poignant, demonstrating how insidious and entrenched gender bias is and how damaging it is to the tender psyches of young people: The primary teacher enforced an arbitrary rule (“she assumed it was obvious”) that the class monitor had to be a boy, even though the then-9-year-old author had earned the privilege by winning the highest grade in the class. Adichie makes her arguments quietly but skillfully.
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and awareness.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-91176-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Readers would do well to heed the dark warning that this book conveys.
The nameless resister inside the White House speaks.
“The character of one man has widened the chasms of American political division,” writes Anonymous. Indeed. The Trump years will not be remembered well—not by voters, not by history since the man in charge “couldn’t focus on governing, and he was prone to abuses of power, from ill-conceived schemes to punish his political rivals to a propensity for undermining vital American institutions.” Given all that, writes the author, and given Trump’s bizarre behavior and well-known grudges—e.g., he ordered that federal flags be raised to full staff only a day after John McCain died, an act that insiders warned him would be construed as petty—it was only patriotic to try to save the country from the man even as the resistance movement within the West Wing simultaneously tried to save Trump’s presidency. However, that they tried did not mean they succeeded: The warning of the title consists in large part of an extended observation that Trump has removed the very people most capable of guiding him to correct action, and the “reasonable professionals” are becoming ever fewer in the absence of John Kelly and others. So unwilling are those professionals to taint their reputations by serving Trump, in fact, that many critical government posts are filled by “acting” secretaries, directors, and so forth. And those insiders abetting Trump are shrinking in number even as Trump stumbles from point to point, declaring victory over the Islamic State group (“People are going to fucking die because of this,” said one top aide) and denouncing the legitimacy of the process that is now grinding toward impeachment. However, writes the author, removal from office is not the answer, not least because Trump may not leave without trying to stir up a civil war. Voting him out is the only solution, writes Anonymous; meanwhile, we’re stuck with a president whose acts, by the resisters’ reckoning, are equal parts stupid, illegal, or impossible to enact.
Readers would do well to heed the dark warning that this book conveys.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1846-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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