by Igor Damaskin with Geoffrey Elliott ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2003
A little clunky, a little slow: a blip in the spy genre.
Evil, upright, or misunderstood? It’s possible to see Red spy Kitty Harris—a.k.a. Elizabeth Dreyfus, Alice Read, Gypsy, Norma, Ada, et al.—as all three in this biography by retired KGB officer Damaskin.
Sometimes a nest of spies is the only family a girl’s got. Having heard the tales of how her own family was brutalized in one Russian pogrom or another, and swept up in the revolutionary fever of the time, London-born Kitty grew up with a sense of outrage. As a young garment worker, she became active in the trade-union movement, and from there it was a short step to joining the Communist Party. She was soon courted by both Earl Browder, the leader of the American branch of the now-Stalinized party, and by Soviet intelligence, which, “in its various acronymic manifestations of Cheka, OGPU, MGB, NKVD, and KGB, was another family: a hard core of officers and support staff, moving from one trouble spot to another, marrying, betraying, helping each other, with the same personalities popping up in Harbin, Shanghai, Berlin, London, Paris, New York, and Mexico City.” Harris was an active and willing spy, constantly on the move, marrying and betraying with the best of them, and steadfastly loyal to Josef Stalin, whom Damaskin portrays as an unusually mild-mannered, unusually smooth-talking chap. (“As the international situation gets more complex,” he remarks, “we need to be fully informed on an even broader range of issues. Above all we need reliable intelligence on what the main capitalist states are planning against us.”) Kitty helpfully provided such intelligence, although, toward the end of her career, her handlers came to see her as something of a loose cannon. Damaskin’s portrait is respectful and even affectionate, though he points to a few careless errors that should have brought Harris down long before her cover was eventually blown.
A little clunky, a little slow: a blip in the spy genre.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-903608-06-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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