Devine’s attention to detail translates into a finely delineated memoir of his selective undercover tradecraft.
Veteran CIA covert operative Devine highlights his career foiling trouble from Chile to Afghanistan. The book was co-authored by Houston Chronicle managing editor Loeb (King's Counsel: A Memoir of War, Espionage, and Diplomacy in the Middle East, 2011, etc.).
Devine, now founding partner of the Arkin Group, which specializes in international crisis management, retired from the CIA as acting director of operations in 1998. He is intensely proud of his 32-year career at the agency and of its original noble intent, inherited from Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, to protect the nation’s national security. Refreshingly, Devine, a blue-collar native of suburban Philadelphia who began to ascend the CIA ranks in the late 1960s, does not sugarcoat the various failed schemes directed by U.S. presidents from Nixon to Bush or the enormously damaging, long-running infiltration by moles like Aldrich Ames. Although Devine’s tenure began after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and ended before 9/11, absolving him from much of the criticism that the CIA attracted then, his first tour was in Chile just when the unrest against democratically elected president Salvador Allende got underway in 1973. Although Devine claims the CIA was not involved in the military coup, he admits to a series of destabilizing measures introduced to bring down the socialist-minded regime, at Nixon’s insistence. The author spends a great deal of space discussing his erstwhile colleague Ames, once a friend, who was well into his downward spiral selling secrets to the Soviets in Rome, where Devine was also stationed—as his superior, in fact. Yet when Ames’ perfidy was discovered in 1994, Devine escaped censure and was instead promoted. Working thematically rather than chronologically, Devine explores his stints of glory, namely funneling guns with Charlie Wilson to Afghanistan’s mujahedeen in order to defeat the Soviets and sustaining important relationships with changing directors.
Devine’s attention to detail translates into a finely delineated memoir of his selective undercover tradecraft.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-13032-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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