Thoroughly researched, fluid and compelling.
The author of three previous accounts of World War II espionage (The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, 2008, etc.) returns with the story of the Childs and their associates during their turbulent, eventful years with the Office of Strategic Services.
Although her title identifies the Childs as her focus, Conant devotes even more attention to the puzzling case of Jane Foster, friend of the Childs and fellow OSS operative later indicted as a Soviet spy. It’s hard not to notice Foster—wealthy, attractive, flighty, loquacious, and “impossible to resist.” The author is certainly interested in Paul and Julia Child—their backgrounds, protracted courtship, wartime activities, postwar lives and Julia’s emergence as a celebrity author and TV personality. But Conant continually returns to the charisma and conundrums of Foster. Was she just irresponsible? Capricious? Careless? Or was she truly ensnared in a vast web of deceit spun by the KGB? The author concludes that Foster was either strikingly dense or actually culpable—near the end she calls her a liar and a “snob to the core.” Conant begins her tale in 1955 when Paul Child, called to Washington for what he thought was a promotion in the United States Information Service, discovered, instead, that he must undergo hours of interrogation. The government was seeking out crypto-Commies—was Paul one? His wife? And what about Jane Foster? Conant then sweeps back into the chaotic days of Wild Bill Donovan and the creation of the OSS, its recruitment of the principals, their activities during the war and their subsequent lives, loves and enterprises. Conant reveals both indignity at the excesses of McCarthyism and disgust with those who committed betrayal.
Thoroughly researched, fluid and compelling.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6352-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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