A streetwise study in disillusionment.
The story of a reluctant CIA case officer, told with brio and dark humor by the ex-spy herself.
Since she knew she was a pretty good liar, Moran decided to join the CIA. She was also a serious Type-A overachiever, and that fit the profile as well. Helped by bona fides including Harvard, a Fulbright fellowship and a year abroad in Bulgaria, she aced the interview process, but immediately began to suffer misgivings. This would not be a woman-friendly world, she realized; her foreign-born boyfriend would have to be jettisoned, and the agency was bound to be a place rife with petty bureaucratic aggravations. Though Moran never mentions the agency’s unsavory reputation, she does admit to being troubled “about the morality of harrying down-on-their-luck foreigners into spying for the United States”—which is pretty much her basic job description. Case officers are not exactly spies; they recruit spies. The memoir’s first half chronicles Moran’s months in the agency’s training program, a stress-filled series of mental and physical tests (including what amounts to torture) that drive home the all-encompassing insularity of life in the CIA, with its culture of paranoia. The author brings a measure of baleful comedy to the proceedings until the narrative hits her posting in Macedonia, where her work becomes increasingly dismal, weighed down by banal paperwork, loneliness, careworn espionage targets and operatives on the scam. Her surroundings also leave Moran appalled and depressed, particularly in Kosovo: “a polluted swath of post-communist wasteland.” Melancholy hangs over the text like a long stretch of bad weather, and more than one reader will be surprised at how satisfying it is to spend time in this greasy fog, as Moran dissects a seemingly useless, spendthrift and desperate institution locked into the Cold War past.
A streetwise study in disillusionment.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15239-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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 engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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