An illuminating investigation that will surprise general readers and aid scholars and students.
An impressively detailed, eye-opening study by film producer Saunders of the CIA’s clandestine sponsorship of artists and
intellectuals during the Cold War. Using interviews and archival data (taken mostly from sources outside the CIA, who routinely ignored her requests under the Freedom of Information Act), Saunders pieces together an elaborate network of CIA money-laundering schemes that funded cultural organizations opposed to communism. Starting with black accounts siphoned off from the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, Saunders details how the CIA created or used nonprofit organizations such as the Ford Foundation to funnel millions of dollars to institutions like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its affiliated programs. While few will be shocked that conservatives like Irving Kristol participated in CIA-backed projects, laymen will be surprised at how the Boston Symphony Orchestra and various abstract expressionist painters (via the Museum of Modern Art under Nelson Rockefeller, its president and an adviser to Eisenhower) benefitted from this largesse. At times the high volume of data and personalities muddies the story, and one would expect more cloak-and-dagger spy stories in such an exhaustive study, but thankfully Saunders does address the crucial issue her subject raises—namely, the consequences of intellectuals accepting money (consciously or unconsciously) from political sources. She pays considerable attention to old controversies, such as (CIA-backed) Encounter’s refusal to publish an article by its former editor Dwight Macdonald, and Conor Cruise O’Brien’s attack on the same journal for its disavowed but evident American boosterism. She can also make the CIA appear enlightened, as when she describes how the Ivy Leaguers of the Agency supported leftist artists over the objections of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In the end, however, Saunders has little tolerance for state-sponsored thinkers. She concludes that when, in the late 1960s, the artists and writers involved in CIA projects began denying rumors of their patrons" background, they were (in words taken from an interview) "crummy liars."
An illuminating investigation that will surprise general readers and aid scholars and students.Pub Date: April 4, 2000
ISBN: 1-56584-596-X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A chilling documentation of what happened in Germany when the Nazis seized power and put their ideas on eugenics and euthanasia into action. Burleigh (International History/London School of Economics; coauthor, The Racial State, not reviewed) points out that the Nazi program began with a humanitarian rationalization: Mentally and physically disabled children were subject to ``mercy killing'' as a form of deliverance. Soon, however, ``mercy killing'' evolved into the elimination of ``life unworthy of life'' as the Nazi killing machine expanded to include more and more victims, and as political, legal, moral, and religious opposition was quashed by the fear of reprisals and totalitarian power. Burleigh demonstrates how Nazi eugenics perverted German medicine and science: Scientists approved the sterilization of some 400,000 people between 1934 and 1945 to eradicate ``degenerative heredity'' in order to ``improve the race.'' Doctors, particularly psychiatrists, were encouraged to falsify medical records, give lethal injections, starve patients, and use other creative means of murder while ignoring the age-old dictum of the physician, ``Do no harm.'' Burleigh also details how asylum populations were decimated as managers, bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, nurses, and other professionals, corrupted by monetary awards and promotions, played their parts in the Nazi murder industry. Daily killings became routine as Nazi propagandists extolled social Darwinism. Burleigh describes how victims were targeted, including Jews, foreigners, enemies of the Reich, gypsies, and those who lacked ``labor values.'' Occasional accounts of humanity brighten the grim story, as medical Schindlers saved patients from death by listing them as valuable workers who were badly needed. After the war, some of the Nazi eugenicists, tried at Nuremberg and in German courts, were executed, while others received light sentences. Most melted into the general population under new identities. A notable contribution to the history of Nazi Germany—and a sobering reminder of what can happen when the claims of science, bureaucracy, and expertise go unchallenged.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-521-41613-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
A trim, at times hypnotic, history of polar exploration. Almost like a documentary filmmaker, Holland (former archivist at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England) has cut and spliced ships' logs, sailors' journals, and other primary sources, adding his own narrative bridges, to present a history of Western encounters with the Arctic. Spurred by mercantilism and nationalism during the age of discovery, European nations sought new lands to colonize and a northwest passage from the Atlantic to the trading centers of Asia. Few who made it into the high latitudes remained untouched by the austere magic of the region. The mid-16th-century Dutch officer Gerrit De Veer wrote: ``Wee saw the first Ice, which we wondered at, at the first, thinking that it had beene white Swannes.'' Later European expeditions to the Arctic had scientific, as well as commercial, missions. And after the North American Arctic had been gradually mapped in the 19th century (mostly by ships sent to search for the ill-fated Franklin Expedition), the North Pole itself became a destination. Over 400 miles away from the nearest point of land along the northern shore of Greenland, the Pole is a spot on the frozen Arctic Ocean devoid of life and without any commercial or geopolitical value. But people wanted to reach it. In 1897, Solomon August AndrÇe made an attempt via unpowered silk hydrogen balloon. He didn't make it, joining a long list of people who had died or were yet to perish in pursuit of a passage or the pole before Robert Peary announced his success in September 1909. Frederick Cook's claim to have reached the pole before Peary has been discredited, though the argument still simmers in polar circles. Thanks are due to Holland for his own smart commentary and for delivering the best of 400 years' worth of source material. These days, if you have enough money, you can have a BBQ at the pole and a sauna back aboard the icebreaker. Heroic polar firsts are a thing of the past, but going over these attempts still makes for an absorbing evening. (Illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-7867-0128-5
Page Count: 314
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
