Intriguing but lacking the salacious detail and hard evidence necessary for true fascination.
An attempt to introduce the world to a female spy far more successful than Mata Hari and just as captivating.
Moura Zakrevskaya (1891-1974) was born in Ukraine to a family with land, wealth, and a connection to the czar. Despite her origins, her instinct for survival and a liberal political temperament led her to spy for the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. After leaving Russia in 1921, though, evidence of her continued spy activity is largely circumstantial. She was often in the right place at the right time to engage in espionage; travel in and out of restricted areas was frequently easier than seemed legitimate; and both the general gossip and the files kept by European governments concluded that she was likely a spy for one entity or another for most of her life. For the most part, McDonald (The Prince, His Tutor and the Ripper: The Evidence Linking James Kenneth Stephen to the Whitechapel Murders, 2007, etc.) and Dronfield (The Locust Farm, 2013, etc.) craft a colorful tale, but they impart little of the urgency that makes spy stories so successful. Combined with the amount of historical and familial detail necessary to make sense of Zakrevskaya’s life, this makes for an informative but rarely thrilling read. The biography is thorough for a subject as careful and secretive as an assumed spy, and while the authors make an effective argument that their subject lived a double life, there is little payoff in terms of hard documentation. Prodigious research and endnotes prove mostly that Zakrevskaya was incredibly effective at survival, generally through her many relationships and affairs. The story retains an air of mystery, much like the woman herself, but in a work promising “the lives, loves and lies of Russia’s most seductive spy,” that mysterious nature is more disappointing than tantalizing.
Intriguing but lacking the salacious detail and hard evidence necessary for true fascination.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78074-708-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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