An irreverent and unsettling footnote to the war on terror.
A maverick spy’s season in prison.
Kiriakou (The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror, 2010) writes that whistleblowing the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program ended his career and led to his prosecution for inadvertently violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act: “I took a plea to one count,” he writes. “I didn’t fear prison. I was tougher than the CIA thought I was.” Still, he was surprised to find that “the training and experience that I had amassed in my CIA career would prepare me to survive and thrive in prison.” Kiriakou references 20 famous espionage “rules”—e.g., “admit nothing, deny everything, make counteraccusations”—as being particularly suited to incarceration, given that “prison is a combination of seventh grade, Lord of the Flies, and a mental institution.” The author had expected to serve about two years in a federal work camp, but he was placed in a low-security prison. Although Kiriakou’s burly physique and black-ops reputation protected him, he still found prison’s brutal, unwritten social codes to be challenging: “There were many more weirdos, lunatics, and freaks than there were good guys.” He notes that due to persistent segregation, he spent a year dining with the self-proclaimed “Aryans” before being invited to join the “Italians” (organized crime members). While Kiriakou speaks highly of a few helpful friends, he is disparaging of most of the people he encountered behind bars, particularly the high population of pedophiles (scorned by all other inmates) and the guards. “There were certainly some COs I respected,” he writes. “The sad truth, however, is that most COs are assholes.” Kiriakou confidently portrays himself as a larger-than-life survivor type, justifiably proud of his stance against CIA–sanctioned torture, but the book suffers from being overly cranky and exceedingly anecdotal.
An irreverent and unsettling footnote to the war on terror.Pub Date: June 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945572-41-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Vireo/Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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