An unsettling narrative of “business as usual” gone awry, and a timely warning for post–Cold War optimists.
A retired American naval intelligence officer chronicles his detention, trial, and conviction for espionage in Russia.
Like many businessmen who went prospecting for opportunities in the wilds of post-Communist Russia, Pope was pursuing a wide variety of semi-promising technologies while steering clear of still-classified projects. He succinctly depicts the nature of business in the new Russia: “Honesty, truthfulness, fair dealings . . . to Russians these are unfamiliar and ineffectual business practices.” Thus, it was hardly surprising when the FSB (the KGB’s still-feared successor) detained Pope for interrogation regarding his interest in the propulsion system of the Shkval torpedo. Although Pope protested that these pursuits were legitimate, the FSB focused on his earlier career with naval intelligence as proof he was a spy in their midst. Worse, the State Department and Pope’s employer, Penn State, virtually disowned him following his arrest, which seemingly emboldened his captors. Eventually, due to intense pressure from his devoted wife Cheri and a few stalwart connections in science and the military, a nonbinding House of Representatives resolution censured Russia for the prosecution, and then-President Clinton lobbied on Pope’s behalf with incoming Russian Federation President Putin, who insisted that Russia’s judicial process must proceed. As his trial slowly continued, Pope deduced that his prosecution was emblematic of a spy mania sweeping the shaky Russian society; many believed it was part of ex-KGB spymaster Putin’s campaign to roll back Yeltsin-era civil liberties. Putin ultimately pardoned Pope, who had spent 253 days in jail. He exhibits empathy for his cellmates (including some likely FSB plants), for others ensnared in the Russian criminal justice system, and for ordinary Russians. But he is not optimistic about the nation’s prospects, noting in conclusion that “Putin and his minions are combining the worst aspects of Communism with the worst aspects of Fascism.”
An unsettling narrative of “business as usual” gone awry, and a timely warning for post–Cold War optimists.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-34873-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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