A vivid history of wartime heroism.
A true-life thriller centers around a defiant woman who spied for Britain.
Loftis (Into the Lion’s Mouth: The True Story of Dusko Popov: World War II Spy, Patriot, and the Real Life Inspiration for James Bond, 2016) recounts the story of Odette Sansom (1912-1995), a Frenchwoman living in England, wife of an Englishman and mother of 3 daughters, who was recruited into Britain’s Special Operations Executive program to conduct espionage in France during World War II. Drawing on interviews, oral histories, and memoirs of key players (including Odette’s commander, lover, and eventually second husband, Peter Churchill), Loftis creates a tense narrative filled with verbatim conversations among more than 30 main characters. Each chapter ends on a cliffhanger, and though the prose is peppered with clichés—Peter and Odette were drawn to each other “like magnets”; they were “at the bridge of the river of love”; when the Gestapo added Peter’s name to their blacklist, “it seemed only a matter of time that lady luck would succumb to the odds”—the author creates a readable page-turner about Odette’s dangerous missions. Although at first reluctant to join the SOE, Odette desperately wanted to help the war effort. Leaving her daughters in a convent school and with relatives, she joined the rigorous training program, becoming proficient with a wide range of weapons, learning the fine points of spycraft—such as distinguishing the uniforms and ranks of Vichy, Axis, Gestapo, SS, and Luftwaffe soldiers—and perfecting her new identity with the code name Lise. Once under Peter’s command in France, she proved herself fearless. Hunted by the Germans, in 1943, Odette and Peter were captured, imprisoned, and tortured. Loftis describes Odette’s ordeal in grisly detail, and she spent months certain that she was about to be executed. But two lies saved her: She pretended that she and Peter were married (they would be after the war) and that Peter was related to Winston Churchill. After their defeat, the Gestapo hoped to use her as a bargaining chip.
A vivid history of wartime heroism.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9865-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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