Even though heavily vetted, if without the black blocks of many other CIA-related texts, a useful inside look at what goes...
Indifferently written but nonetheless fascinating glimpse into the CIA’s most secret—and secretive—department.
Crumpton’s quarter-century career with Clandestine Services, he writes, began as a childhood reverie: “As a young boy, I dreamed of becoming a spy.” It took some doing to get recruited, he recounts (“I had no military service, no foreign language, no graduate degree, no technical skill, and no professional pedigree”), but once in, he excelled at the tough physical work required of a CIA agent in the field, adopting the enthusiasm for the mission that long periods spent under difficult circumstances requires. Some of what Crumpton describes is mundane—e.g., the daily administrative affairs that surround spy work, particularly the politics of intelligence. Only when the agency is threatened does he become piqued enough to go beyond colorless descriptions, as when he writes indignantly of the outing of Valerie Plame (a “horrible breach of trust” on the part of the Bush administration). In fairness, the author is also hard on the current administration (“When President Obama assumed office in January 2009, his Justice Department threatened CIA officers with jail—because they had carried out lawful orders under the previous administration”). His narrative is more vivid, if full of expected turns, when he discusses his time in the field as a commander of operations in Afghanistan, battling Taliban and al-Qaida fighters while trying to smoke Osama Bin Laden out of hiding. Of particular interest is his account of the prison uprising that led to the killing of CIA operative Mike Spann in 2001.
Even though heavily vetted, if without the black blocks of many other CIA-related texts, a useful inside look at what goes on behind closed doors—and iron curtains.Pub Date: May 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59420-334-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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