A murky effort exacerbated by myriad shadowy agencies and a deeply unsympathetic protagonist.
An obscure wartime spy working for the OSS, the wartime precursor to the CIA, gets a thorough exposé by a government lawyer and former CIA officer.
Bradley’s sense of frustration at how this arrogant, dissembling underling of William Donovan got away with passing information to the Soviet spy network is partly explained by the general atmosphere of fear raging after the war and the fact that the American government had bigger fish to net—e.g., Alger Hiss. Indeed, while Duncan Lee (1913–1988) did not seem to have done harm to the U.S. war effort, he did provide the Soviets with information about OSS internal employees at security risk, thus tipping off the Soviets to the status of their agents. A child of missionary evangelicals in China, a student at Yale in the 1930s and a Rhodes scholar, Lee became politically radicalized at Oxford, largely under the sway of his socialist wife-to-be, Ishbel. Visiting the Soviet Union, he grew infatuated with communism and, in 1937, announced to his horrified parents “in a mixture of scripted lecture and outright rebellion” that he and Ishbel were joining the Communist Party of Great Britain. Back in the U.S., the couple first came under the scrutiny of the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, when their landlady reported their “decidedly pink” views. The outbreak of war brought Lee to Washington to work with Donovan in his new intelligence service, and Lee began passing information to Mary Price, his first handler, a fellow Southerner working for Soviet agent Jacob Golos. From Price, he would be passed to agent Elizabeth Bentley, whose eventual breakdown and confession to the FBI would out Lee and dozens of others, dragging them before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948. Yet Lee’s subsequent work in China funneling arms to Chiang Kai-shek allowed him to fly under the radar of prosecutors.
A murky effort exacerbated by myriad shadowy agencies and a deeply unsympathetic protagonist.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-03009-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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