Laborious diatribe against the Feds, with little evidence other than Kaiser’s say-so.
The CEO of a Maryland electronics company specializing in eavesdropping and explosives detection equipment tells of spooks, dirty tricks and vengeful federal agents.
Kaiser recounts two stories with the help of novelist/journalist Stokes. The first, and more engaging, is a chronicle of the evolution from the 1960s onward of electronic eavesdropping technology and applications. It’s couched in a tone suggesting the reader doesn’t suspect half of what’s been going on, an attitude buttressed by an appendix detailing surveillance techniques and countermeasures. The second story is the author’s personal account of what he alleges was a harrowing, long-term FBI campaign against him. A steady supplier of listening devices and countermeasures to a dummy company used by the Bureau for such purchases, Kaiser was called to testify during a 1975 congressional probe into questionable activities. His revelation under oath that the FBI was illegally inflating cost figures set Hoover’s minions on a trail of revenge, he asserts. The vendetta culminated in Kaiser’s indictment for the illegal wiretapping of two FBI agents during an investigation of bank fraud. He was acquitted of all charges but had to deal with a civil suit by the two agents (they were taped using equipment Kaiser had installed for the bank). That suit, he avers, nearly cost him his business, his marriage and his mental health; after eight years, his insurance company forced him to settle out of court. Kaiser’s narrative contains some entertaining revelations about his adventures running countermeasure “sweeps” for both government and corporate clients, but redundant protestations of innocence, allegations of persecution and a persistent air of overblown self-importance drag down too many of these pages.
Laborious diatribe against the Feds, with little evidence other than Kaiser’s say-so.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1546-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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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