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
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
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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