Treads familiar territory (his previous memoirs are much of the same), but readers new to his work will enjoy the exciting...
Doundoulakis’ (I Was Trained to Be a Spy, Book II, 2012, etc.) memoir, co-written with Gafni, tells of his time as a young Greek who fled German-occupied Greece and returned later to face the enemy as an American spy.
When German forces drove Allied troops out of Greece, Doundoulakis and his brother, George, became a part of the Cretan resistance. But the two had to escape their home in Crete once the Gestapo learned of George’s association with British intelligence. Due to their time in the resistance and the fact that they were American citizens (born in Ohio), the brothers enlisted in the U.S. Army and joined the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS-trained Doundoulakis made his way back to Greece as a radio operator, where sending a covert transmission to Cairo headquarters could, if intercepted by the Germans, easily lead to capture and torture. The author’s memoir perfectly encapsulates the mixed feelings of his younger self; he was only 20 when sent to the city of Salonica, an event that was both exhilarating and terrifying. His flight from Greece, where he and others hid in caves, is an intense episode, as is his secret passage back into the country. But Doundoulakis’ espionage in Salonica—a substantial part of the story—is the most nerve-wracking section, because Doundoulakis, trained to avoid as much contact with German soldiers as possible, was perpetually wary and alert. He set up his radio antenna concealed in a factory (where he sold supplies as a front), while four German officers played bridge next door; just one of them looking up would have meant almost certain doom. Doundoulakis smartly centers his novel on his personal escapades and doesn’t pad down the narrative with unnecessary coverage of the ongoing World War II. There are constant reminders of the unrelenting danger: Parachute training, for instance, was euphoric for Doundoulakis, but less so when his chute didn’t open during one of the jumps. His OSS instructor summed it up best when he said that the spy life “is the kind of experience that you will brag about to your family and friends, if you survive.”
Treads familiar territory (his previous memoirs are much of the same), but readers new to his work will enjoy the exciting life he’s chosen to share.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499059823
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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