Bibliophiles with a taste for cloak-and-dagger work will enjoy this lively book.
Bookworms become spooks in this engaging study of wartime American intelligence.
Spies aren’t always James Bond types, historian and Stony Brook professor Graham notes; some of the earliest members of the World War II–era OSS were literature professors, librarians, and researchers whose common denominator was bibliomania. Founder William Donovan, a lawyer and a passionate book collector, inaugurated a division called Research & Analysis, which “represented something new in the world of spycraft,” its scholarly staff charged with researching subjects thoroughly before action was taken. One of Graham’s heroes, a formidable woman named Adele Kibre, “dark-haired, wicked-eyed, a classicist by training,” logged time in Stockholm acquiring European publications for OSS analysis, including, thanks to her wooing various Nazi officials, plenty of books and papers from the Third Reich. All of Graham’s bookworm subjects trained in the dark arts of assassination and disguise, and while many operated in plain sight of the enemy in neutral countries such as Sweden and Turkey, others went deep undercover. Some are relatively well known, such as the assessors who examined stolen Nazi art to return masterworks to their homes. Others figure in the history of scholarship but are little known today, such as the egomaniacal anthropologist Carleton Coon, whose racist theories gave aid and comfort to Nazi theorists but who served in the OSS all the same. Of all the figures in the book, Kibre is the centerpiece, and Graham does good service by highlighting her work and skills, which included concocting whatever persona appealed most to whomever she was dealing with. Graham closes with a note about how some of the scholars helped shape the successor CIA, and she makes a good case for studying the humanities as both an instrument of learning and a weapon of war.
Bibliophiles with a taste for cloak-and-dagger work will enjoy this lively book.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780063280847
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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