by Joe Navarro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
A fascinating account of counterintelligence in the pre-cyber era and a reminder of how an astute interviewer can be an...
Firsthand account of Cold War espionage from the FBI agent who uncovered it.
Navarro (Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People, 2014, etc.), a founding member of the FBI’s National Security Division Behavioral Analysis Program, recounts his dogged efforts to court and prosecute a bedraggled but brilliant young spy in the late 1980s. What began as a routine interview for Navarro, who had SWAT team, aerial surveillance, and counterintelligence responsibilities in the Tampa office, turned into an all-consuming absorption with an unprecedented spy enterprise in West Germany. Over a year and a half, the author met repeatedly—eventually daily—with Rod Ramsay, a former soldier who had been the junior partner of an espionage mastermind at the 8th Infantry Division headquarters. Navarro and his superiors learned that the two men passed along incalculably important information, including war plans, to the Hungarians and the Soviets. At times, the author gets mired in government jargon, but he presents a riveting story of how he earned Ramsay’s confidence and slowly elicited a mountain of incriminating information. He was helped by the suspect’s loneliness and narcissism. Navarro provides a tutorial on interviewing technique, employing psychology, theater, and a well-honed understanding of nonverbal cues. In fact, several minor aberrations in body language triggered the case that led to one of the biggest spy busts in American history. However, throughout the investigation, Navarro was thwarted by intra- and interagency jealousies and turf concerns. The process affected his family life and eventually his physical and mental health. It took him more than 25 years to write this story of a serious breach in American national security.
A fascinating account of counterintelligence in the pre-cyber era and a reminder of how an astute interviewer can be an invaluable asset to law enforcement.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2827-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Joe Navarro with Toni Sciarra Poynter
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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
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