Forget (largely) about the “history” part; this is an anecdote-rich, if sometimes factually questionable, series of tales about the extraordinary derring-do of Israel’s vaunted elite foreign intelligence service. Prolific British journalist Thomas (Enslaved, 1991; Chaos Under Heaven: The Shocking Story Behind China’s Search for Democracy, 1991; etc.), whose 38th book this is, spent over 100 hours interviewing Mossad heads and agents, as well as others whose lives have been affected by the agency, including Yasir Arafat (a frequent assassination target before the 1993 Oslo agreement). To his credit, he delves into the organization’s more significant bungled operations, including the mid-1970s killing of an innocent Arab waiter in Norway who was thought to be one of the PLO perpetrators of the 1972 Munich massacre of Israel’s Olympic team. Thomas also provides readers with a good sense of how the Mossad trains its operatives in the field and of how extensively Israeli agents have infiltrated even the most apparently inaccessible parts of the Arab world. (It was a Mossad case officer in the Iraqi desert who, days before the 1991 Gulf War began, discovered that Baghdad had far more SCUD missiles in advanced positions than the CIA knew.) For the most part, though, Thomas contributes to the mythologizing of the Mossad by portraying an endlessly resourceful, often ruthless service that seems straight out of a James Bond film. How many of his tales are true? As Thomas doesn’t document, aside from a short list of “primary interviewees” and other sources, it’s hard to say. Nor does he build credibility by getting certain basic facts wrong or by occasionally offering hyperventilating prose. In short, this fun read, while containing much juicy ready-for-film-adaptation material, should be approached with a skeptical eye by readers interested in serious history.
Pub Date: March 22, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19982-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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