Fans of spy fiction and true crime will find plenty to enjoy in O’Neill’s account.
“Robert Philip Hanssen was the greatest spy in US history.” So writes cybersecurity expert O’Neill, who, as an FBI agent, helped bring Hanssen down.
Early on in this account of the notorious Soviet spy case, the author relates that he has a special gift: being ordinary, melting into the scenery and not calling attention to himself. “I was trained,” he writes, “to blend into situations, to find cover in plain sight, to look unobtrusive, uninteresting, and unremarkable.” That ability to “be gray,” as he puts it, served him well when he was brought on to the case of Hanssen, who was nursing grievances galore about being passed over for promotion and not paid as much as he felt he deserved, along with resentment that the FBI had “dashed his James Bond dreams by closeting him with analysts and techies.” All of these grievances drove him to sell out to the Soviets—and, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to Russian Federation intelligence. An expert in computers, Hanssen delivered the names of American assets, some of whom were then executed. As he recounts, O'Neill helped construct “an extraordinary mousetrap” in the elaborate sequence of events after Hanssen was identified as a Russian agent. “We couldn’t rely solely on surveillance to catch him,” he writes, since Hanssen was so skilled at eluding “ghost teams” and covering up his tracks. The solution was to get close, flatter, record, and “train myself to orient and decide faster than the spy” in figuring out what was going to come next. O’Neill’s narrative sometimes falls into the familiar clichés of espionage, but it is valuable in its exploration of the psychology of the traitor and his motivations as well as how spies like Hanssen so often enjoy success for as long as they do until finally caught: “Amateurs may hack machines, but professionals hack people.”
Fans of spy fiction and true crime will find plenty to enjoy in O’Neill’s account.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57352-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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 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
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