Politically neutral, educational, and sometimes insightful adventures of a working spy before and after retirement.
An ex–intelligence officer delivers a mixture of autobiography, insider tales, and occasional derring-do.
In his first book, former staff CIA operations officer Roy writes that his youthful ambition to become a spy owed less to a macho character than to his love of travel. After finishing law school and passing the bar, he underwent the yearlong CIA training course, which included more fireworks and hardship than he encountered during a 13-year career (1983 to 1996), mostly in Latin America and the former Yugoslavia. Historians have revealed many of the CIA’s disastrous covert operations and intelligence failures, but few deny that its central function—gathering information on foreign nations’ leaders and public opinion—has been important. The author emphasizes that governments (no less than individuals) ignore accurate information that contradicts their beliefs. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Yugoslavia began breaking up. American policy insisted that the nation remain united despite CIA warnings that almost no one in Yugoslavia wanted this outcome and that murderous hatred between ethnic groups might require outside intervention. Roy recounts these dismal events and his own adventures when, after several years and many mass atrocities, the U.S. took notice. He adds that, having ignored the facts on Yugoslavia, the American government did the same with Iraq. Despite pressure from above, the CIA could not find a good reason to invade, but the leaders went ahead anyway. Leaving the service, Roy became an entrepreneur, first in the former Yugoslavia and then in Iraq immediately after the 2003 conquest. He recounts often hair-raising adventures, but readers curious about the nature of his business will be frustrated. The book is less an autobiography than a collection of short chapters recounting the mechanics of intelligence-gathering (successes as well as failures), the occasional narrow escape, essays on world hot spots, complaints about political leaders, and plenty of CIA gossip.
Politically neutral, educational, and sometimes insightful adventures of a working spy before and after retirement.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63388-588-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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