bookshelf

STASI

Name: STASI
Author: John O. Koehler
ISBN: 0-8133-3409-8

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE EAST GERMAN SECRET POLICE

by John O. Koehler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1999

bookshelf

There has never been a secret police more fanatically intent on finding out what was going on than the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police force. It’s an irony of Koehler’s authoritative book that ultimately the Stasi were unable to prevent—or even predict—the fall of East Germany. Not for want of trying. The KGB had 480,000 full-time agents to oversee 280 million people, or one for every 5,830 citizens; the Gestapo had one for every 2,000; and the Stasi had one for every 166. If one adds the number of regular informers, it came to one for every 66. Never in the history of espionage have so many spied on so few or recorded so much in such tedious detail. Koehler, Berlin bureau chief of the Associated Press during the height of the Cold War (as well as assistant to the president and director of communications under President Reagan), obtained copies of the Stasi’s AP dossier, which weighed in at 14 pounds. Thousands of canning jars were found in the archives, filled with cloth impregnated with the body odors of suspected dissidents, so that they could be tracked by Stasi bloodhounds. But the Stasi also went to immense trouble to infiltrate its agents, particularly into West Germany. Thus, Gunter Guillaume was appointed one of the three assistants to Chancellor Willi Brandt, a rank equivalent to deputy assistant to the president of the US, and perhaps he was even closer, since he was reported to have acted as a pimp for Brandt. Unsurprisingly, extraordinary sums were spent on Stasi activities. Thus, in 1988 alone, nearly $450 million was spent on assistance to the Cubans, Nicaraguans, Africans, and other recipients. So the final irony may be that the East Germans ruined themselves in their efforts to gain more security. Sometimes a little breathless, but a detailed and comprehensive insight into one of the most chilling and the most thorough secret police forces in history. (b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-8133-3409-8

Page Count: 448

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998

Categories:

HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

bookshelf

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974

bookshelf

Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

Pub Date: June 18, 1974

ISBN: 0671894412

Page Count: 372

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
PERIL
by Bob Woodward & Robert Costa

- BOOK REVIEW
RAGE
by Bob Woodward

- BOOK REVIEW
FEAR
by Bob Woodward

bookshelf

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

bookshelf

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.