Not only a dramatic disclosure of the Vatican’s covert actions, but also an absorbing, polished story for all readers of...
Riebling (Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, 1994), an expert on secret intelligence, compellingly explores the papacy’s involvement in espionage during World War II.
Pope Pius XII (1876-1958) was a political pope, and his was a pontificate of war. He valued science and technology and prefigured many leaders by installing an audio spying system in his library. The Holy See was actually hardwired by renowned Italian electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi. In 1940, the Vatican proposed preventing future aggression with an Economic Union of Europe. The key component was Josef Müller, a Bavarian lawyer whose legal resistance to the Nazis led Heinrich Himmler, after first arresting him for treasonous conspiracy, to invite him to join the SS. Knowing Hitler’s hatred for Catholics, and particularly Jesuits, Müller agreed to join the Vatican in facilitating connections between rebellious officers and England. He acted under orders from Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, chief of German military intelligence, as a double spy pretending to undermine the Vatican. Canaris was part of a wide conspiracy led by Gen. Ludwig Beck. Müller’s travels between Germany and the Vatican included liaisons with the “Orders Committee” of Jesuits and Dominicans and made him one of the church’s most valuable spies, even after his arrest. The pope claimed that Müller’s exploits in smuggling, politics, and confounding the Nazis “worked wonders.” This book has much to surprise, especially the many German officers, separately and together, involved in attempts on Hitler’s life. There were many other “decent Germans” who hated Hitler, but they couldn’t betray their “fatherland.” Pius, vilified by critics who believed he ignored Germany’s atrocities, comes off as a politically savvy man who realized his interference would precipitate Hitler’s mortal overreaction against German Catholics.
Not only a dramatic disclosure of the Vatican’s covert actions, but also an absorbing, polished story for all readers of World War II history.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-02229-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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