by Larry Devlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2007
An unusually open look at CIA operations in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, adding an interesting, perhaps controversial,...
A spy comes in from the dripping heat.
Devlin, long retired from The Company, recounts a busy career fending off Soviet ambitions in Africa as a CIA agent and then station chief, a spook’s version of ambassador. In most parts of the world, he writes, that rivalry was an aptly named cold war, whereas in Congo, where he was stationed, it was decidedly a hot one. Newly independent from a once-rapacious Belgium, for whose colonial administrators Devlin has little use, Congo faced its first major crisis when the new leader, Patrice Lumumba, “promised all government employees a pay raise, all, that is, except the army.” In a country where the army has all the guns, that is always a dicey proposition, and Lumumba found himself facing civil war, urged along by the American government, which wanted to see him gone; one memo of Aug. 26, 1960, puts its baldly: “if Lumumba continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will at best be chaos and at worst pave the way to a Communist takeover of the Congo. . . . Consequently, we concluded that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert action.” By his account conscience-stricken, Devlin resisted doing the wet work. By other accounts, which Devlin cites, he was roundly implicated in the eventual ouster and assassination of Lumumba. Given what seems to be an air of late-in-life candor, it seems reasonable to trust the author, but you can’t ever know for sure. In whatever case, Lumumba’s absence opened the door to long-reigning dictator Mobutu, whom Devlin considers a pretty good guy overall; America’s interests were thus well served, thanks as much to Soviet ineptitude as to anything the CIA did.
An unusually open look at CIA operations in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, adding an interesting, perhaps controversial, footnote to the still-much-debated death of Lumumba.Pub Date: March 12, 2007
ISBN: 1-58648-405-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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 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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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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