At its most successful, a book for buffs.
An intelligence expert’s look at British spying during WWII.
The world of spying is at once captivating and dull. On its face, what could be more exciting? Missions, lies, gadgets, codes, “intelligence,” and all their counterparts have always had a place in the public imagination. One can’t help but imagine dashing agents and tawdry seductresses sipping their way through Europe, fighting Hitler and hangovers at once. And yet it’s all been done—so much so that James Bond has had to resort to bigger, more violent explosions to attract an audience. Stafford (Roosevelt and Churchill, 2000, etc.), however, remains enthralled, not so much by Bond as by the truth, i.e., real-life heroism—which is . . . okay, but not quite as thrilling. He tells of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), an eccentric intelligence agency that handled some of Britain’s wartime espionage. (The Secret Intelligence Service actually was a larger organization, but Stafford discusses them only as a rival to the SOE.) SOE agents were trained extensively. They learned to kill with or without a gun, send encoded messages, destroy industrial machinery, and break down doors. And they had some of those neat gadgets, foremost among them an exploding rat that could destroy an industrial furnace if thrown into the fire, or take off a guard’s foot if kicked. The training and the tricks resulted in some important successes. Most notably the SOE managed to destroy a vital transportation link for Himmler’s army in Greece, and a heavy water facility in Norway that was essential to the German A-bomb effort. There were defeats as well, but in the end the SOE, like the Allies, emerged triumphant. The same cannot be said for Stafford’s narrative, which relies too heavily on first-hand accounts—quotations stretch as long as ten pages—and fails to express anything other than nostalgia.
At its most successful, a book for buffs.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-168-1
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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