An inconspicuous but well-informed and readable snapshot of one of America’s most secretive organizations.
An inside look at the CIA over the past few decades, including the agency’s degradation and politicization in the age of Trump.
London is a decorated 34-year veteran of the CIA and currently teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. It’s clear the author has good intentions in revealing his experiences and opinions about the history and direction of the agency, and he shares a secret or two, but as with many books about the CIA, FBI, or other government agencies, redactions scrape away some of the intrigue. In addition to his overview of his entry into the CIA and subsequent training—there’s plenty about the embarrassments at jump school but little about tradecraft—London devotes most of the book to “war stories,” describing his experience as a case officer in recruiting agents, foreign spies working on behalf of the U.S. but lacking any identifiable factors, from geography to the culture of local forces working in opposition to American interests. One refreshing discovery two decades after 9/11 is the importance that the agency levies on HUMINT, or human intelligence derived from agents and other actors, bad and good, that leads to actionable pursuits to move a case forward or interrupt a plot to hurt others. “Espionage is about relationships,” writes London. “Agents are all human beings with hopes, dreams, fears and communities….They don’t want to be treated like prostitutes, nor even employees, and they deserve respect. You dehumanize them or otherwise take them for granted at your own peril.” There are a few recognizable names here, but most of the players remain silent, from a case officer who committed suicide to an aggressively alcoholic head of a remote posting to the asset who declared that he needed to kill his handler in order to be taken seriously.
An inconspicuous but well-informed and readable snapshot of one of America’s most secretive organizations.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-306-84730-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
