Waller keeps the interest high and the pages turning in one of the more interesting spy books this year.
Former Newsweek and Time correspondent Waller expands on his earlier biography of the Office of Strategic Services founder (Wild Bill Donovan, 2011, etc.) with a history of the four men who worked for Donovan in the European theater.
What Allen Dulles, Bill Casey, Bill Colby, and Richard Helms had in common were the shared characteristics of the men of the OSS. They came from old American families, excelled at school, mastered at least one foreign language, and, with the exception of Colby, came from wealth. Each also eventually headed the CIA. The author shies away from painting the OSS as something of an old boys’ network, but it certainly attracted officers from the best families. Dulles’ time with the State Department in Vienna taught him never to ignore a potential informer, as he unfortunately did with Vladimir Lenin in 1917. He ended up running the Bern office of the OSS and gathered a most successful haul of espionage of World War II from Fritz Kolbe of the German Foreign Office, who supplied him with information about the Third Reich. Colby trained the Jedburgh commandos, who parachuted into France to lead the resistance, and Colby himself even jumped into Norway on bridge-blowing missions. Casey, with his business experience at the Research Institute of America, was “fixer” for diplomat David Bruce’s London Station and managed covert-ops teams sent into German territory. Journalist Helms finally arrived in London in 1945 to join and organize the OSS mission Dulles would lead in Germany after the surrender. These men were in the thick of America’s spy game for decades, and Waller’s broad knowledge of their work could easily have been four separate books. His analysis of their effectiveness is eye-opening, as is his short history of their time at the CIA—but that’s for another book. Especially helpful for readers is the cast of characters at the beginning.
Waller keeps the interest high and the pages turning in one of the more interesting spy books this year.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9372-0
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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