Once-over-lightly profiles of more than two score spies, code- breakers, defectors, moles, and saboteurs who've engaged in the intelligence trade during the 20th century. While the list of men and women in the author's gallery of rogues is somewhat arbitrary, it affords a representative sampling of those whose covert activities ``directly affected the fate of empires, nations, or history itself.'' For example, Volkman (Secret Intelligence, 1989; The Heist, 1986, etc.) offers brief, authoritative dossiers on such storied figures as Anthony Blunt, Whittaker Chambers, Eric Erickson (the so-called counterfeit traitor), Klaus Fuchs, Igor Gouzenko, Oleg Penkovsky, H.A.R. (Kim) Philby, Richard Sorge, Herbert Yardley, and Margareta Zelle (better known as Mata Hari). He also reviews the exploits of less familiar operatives, including George Blake (the original Manchurian candidate), Eliyahu Cohen (Israel's short-lived man in Damascus), Leiba Domb (conductor of WW II's Red Orchestra), Rudolf Roessler (aka Luey, for his Lucerne base), and Wilhelm Wassmuss (the German Lawrence). Covered as well are the coldblooded organization-men who ran whole services or significant networks—the likes of Lavreati Beria (KGB), Claude Dansey (MI6's Z Ring), Reinhard Heydrich (SD), Gabor Peter (the Stalinist head of Hungry's secret police), K'ang Sheng (Mao's security chief), Gestapo boss Heinrich Mueller (who may have gone over to the Soviets just before V-E Day), intrepid William Stephenson (Winston Churchill's favorite spook), and the shadowy Markus Wolf (East Germany's HVA). Last but not least, the author focuses on literary lights who did undercover work at some point in their careers—Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham. Cloak-and-dagger buffs may quarrel about their favorite omissions, but Volkman's short-take files afford general readers an consistently absorbing and informative introduction to key players in the espionage game. (Illustrations throughout)
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-55714-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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