Kassinger’s depiction of intelligence gathering at ground level is engrossing and rings with real-McCoy authenticity.
Kassinger presents an unvarnished memoir of his days in the field as a CIA support officer.
Kassinger thought he was headed for a career in the Marines until he was dazzled by a CIA recruiter and embarked on a decades-long tenure with the agency. In this thoughtfully laid out, perceptive and richly detailed chronicle, he captures the many events he played a part in orchestrating. When Kassinger entered the CIA, he did not have a college degree, so advancement looked grim. But he hired on as a contract employee and slowly, steadily gained in pay grade, from file clerk to a roving, troubleshooting support officer in the Directorate of Operations. Kassinger emerges as a humble, capable character, a quick study, someone who brought both pride and a sense of ethics to a slippery job (he even had a brush with Oliver North). There is still plenty that Kassinger has to keep under wraps—like names and the location of his first assignment, referred to simply as the “Site”—which lends the proceedings a note of mystery. He is both appreciative of the opportunity to range about the world—“The smell and sounds of Africa would take control of our senses, as we sat in our Isuzu Trooper eating quiche, drinking our Bloody Marys, and listening to the roar of lions after an early morning kill”—and excited by the challenges of his work, though his low-key demeanor keeps the excitement from becoming breathless. His travels are far and wide, one minute in Central Asia, then in Central Europe, down in Central America, putting out brush fires and jerry-rigging equipment to meet the logistical needs of the field stations, but clearly his favorite assignments are in Africa, and the strongest, most evocative chapters in the book take place during the delamination of Somalia. He also provides an intelligent analysis of the CIA’s own delamination, and its effects on the employees, during the mid-’90s.
Kassinger’s depiction of intelligence gathering at ground level is engrossing and rings with real-McCoy authenticity.Pub Date: July 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-1434907820
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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