Reads like a fine spy novel whose ending we know but whose story transports us nonetheless.
The intense and intimate story of espionage involving Soviet and American agents; one of the latter was the author’s father.
Dillon, a veteran journalist who served as the president of Reader’s Digest and has worked for Vogue, Harper’s, the New Yorker, and other publications, debuts with a tale full of intrigue, ignorance, treason, treachery, family, greed, and loyalty—to country, to lucre, to human rights. The author tells us about two families: her own and that of Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a high-ranking Soviet intelligence official, who, for decades, shared critical information with his American counterparts, including Dillon’s father. With detail and technique that are almost novelistic, the author alternates the stories of the two families and describes her awareness, much later on, that her father was a CIA agent. Appearing in the text are some names familiar to followers of spy stories: Kim Philby, Philip Agee, and, most grievously in this particular story, Aldrich Ames. Using multiple interviews of principals and her comprehensive research, Dillon shows the internecine battles within the CIA, the fierce paranoia evident among many on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and the failure of intelligence officials to see the traitorous behavior that, in some cases, was flaring prominently. Ames, for example, was living a life that was far beyond his means, yet it took years for his superiors to catch on; likewise, the Soviets could not believe that a decorated hero like Polyakov would betray his country. Throughout the narrative, the author weaves the personal family stories of both of her principals—her own, of course, but she awards special attention to Polyakov’s son, Alexander, who also was working in intelligence but was unaware of his father’s alliances. We know the outcomes, so the dramatic irony is piercing.
Reads like a fine spy novel whose ending we know but whose story transports us nonetheless.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-238588-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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