A colorful history, but overly ambitious, often disorienting and not entirely convincing.
Dense, exhaustive account of espionage and intrigue directed by and against the Vatican, from 1566 to the present.
Madrid-based TV correspondent Frattini, who has published several Spanish-language nonfiction titles, presents a dizzying history that would have been more effective on a smaller scale. As written, this hectic, whirlwind account races through five centuries and a seemingly endless list of names, dates and characters without allowing the many dramatic vignettes to fully take hold. Astonishing tales abound along the way, starting with the creation of the Vatican’s spy service, originally called the Holy Alliance, by Pope Pius V, who wanted to overthrow England’s Protestant Queen Elizabeth I and place Catholic Mary Stuart on her throne. The author claims that the Holy Alliance later spawned its own counterespionage wing and a “hit squad” that assassinated numerous perceived enemies of the Church. Not all of these assertions are convincing, or well documented—Frattini routinely cites rumors and speculation as plausible facts—but they certainly make for curious reading. The author finds the hand of Vatican spies throughout the royal courts of Europe, the war rooms of major combatants in both world wars, the boardrooms of corrupt money-laundering bankers and the halls of spy services from the CIA to Mossad. According to Frattini, Vatican agents have done everything from helping Nazi war criminals flee to South America after World War II to thwarting the assassination of Golda Meir by terrorists in 1973. In one anecdote, he recounts how the Holy Alliance stymied a plot in 1881 to steal the remains of Pope Pius IX. Indeed, for all the intrigue allegedly perpetrated by the Vatican, Frattini notes that the Pope was equally the target of espionage. For centuries, the halls of the Vatican were rife with spies, especially during times of war, when the Vatican’s neutrality, or lack thereof, was of major concern to belligerents.
A colorful history, but overly ambitious, often disorienting and not entirely convincing.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37594-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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