An intriguing spy biography that ably demonstrates how fierce adherence to an ideology can lead to human suffering on terms...
A talented and seductive spy pops up in places as diverse as Hollywood, Prague, Paris and Mexico City, organizing anti-Nazi, pro-Communist propaganda before dangling at the end of a hangman’s noose in 1952.
Miles (The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century, 2007, etc.) presents a complicated tale of espionage, human cruelty, war and retribution. The author begins in 1952 when Noël Coward, one of Katz’s numerous celebrity acquaintances, discovered that Katz, having outlived his usefulness, was on trial for treason in Prague. After dealing swiftly with this classic Communist-era show trial, Miles returns to 1895 and the birth of the Jewish Katz in southern Bohemia. The author digs up what he can (not much) on Katz’s boyhood and education, showing how he fell in love with socialism in his mid-teens, got caught up in Prague’s theater and art world, met Kafka and began to come of age. A handsome, slick operator, he was soon at work in publications and propaganda. Along the way he associated with some of the era’s most notable writers, artists and actors, including Dietrich, Koestler, Dos Passos, Hemingway and many others. Security services in France, England and the United States were watching him, though never very efficiently. His multiple aliases, smooth demeanor and celebrity connections seemed to shield him from surveillance. Miles properly credits him for exposing the cruelties of the Nazis, and he also charts Katz’s growing discomfort with the brutalities of Stalin—though he stayed ever loyal to the Communist Party. The author also suggests that the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy and that Britain’s MI5 comprised a collection of bungling boobs.
An intriguing spy biography that ably demonstrates how fierce adherence to an ideology can lead to human suffering on terms both intimate and global.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59691-661-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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