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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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