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
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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