A reticent but still revealing memoir by the man who was in overall charge not only of the development of the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes and the spy satellite program, but also of the Bay of Pigs. Bissell was one of the best of that remarkable group of public servants that emerged during and immediately after the Second World War. In 1954, shortly after joining the CIA, he was given responsibility for the U-2, and only 20 months elapsed before its first overflight of the Soviet Union. Eisenhower insisted on approving each and every flight, and though Bissell blames himself for recommending the mission of Francis Gary Powers, who was shot down just before the summit with Khrushchev, it is clear that the program gave the US invaluable insight into Soviet capabilities, which were considerably less than the public feared. That knowledge, Bissell contends, enabled Eisenhower to be calm in periods of great international tension and also to resist efforts to build more expensive weapons systems. It later completely discredited the notion of the ``missile gap.'' By contrast, even Bissell is not sure that the Cuban Brigade could have succeeded in overthrowing Castro, but he is certain that the effect of Kennedy's decision to change its objective away from an area where defections were possible and guerrilla operations more feasible, and then to reduce the air strikes by 80 percent (so that Castro's air force of four or five aircraft survived) doomed the enterprise. Again Bissell blames himself for not recommending cancellation of the invasion when it should have become clear that it could not succeed. This is not a book of moral anguish or the telling personal detail. But as the record of an honorable and effective public servant in dangerous times, it is wise and worthwhile.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-300-06430-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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