by Mark Ryan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2009
Ryan skillfully builds and sustains interest through a narrative that grows increasingly convoluted.
A ripping real-life yarn of espionage and daring that also inspired Ken Follett’s novel Hornet Flight (2002).
Shortly before feisty 89-year-old Thomas Sneum died in 2007, British journalist Ryan tracked down the former pilot and elicited his amazing story of spying for British Intelligence in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Sneum grew up on the island of Fanoe, off the West coast. In April 1940, he was a 22-year-old flight lieutenant, furious that his superiors had refused to engage the mighty Luftwaffe as the Germans rolled into Denmark. Vowing to help the British, Sneum was careful to ingratiate himself with the occupiers. When a Nazi officer responded to his questions about a mysterious installation the Germans were building on Fanoe by boasting of “special technology” that could spot aircraft from far away, Sneum didn’t realize it was radar (then a little-known innovation), but he did guess it was a dangerous new tool. When he got to the British Legation outside Stockholm with this information, the naval attaché suggested he return to Fanoe and take photographs of it. Sneum not only got the photos, he insisted on flying them to England himself. With the help of his friend and co-pilot Kjeld Pedersen, he refurbished a beat-up Havilland Hornet Moth and took it on a hare-brained flight across the North Sea. Ryan’s depiction of this six-hour odyssey is studded with jaw-dropping facts: To refuel, for example, Sneum had to walk out on the wing while airborne. The author also crafts a convincing description of his subject as a scrappy, immodest, slightly oily charmer. The SIS sent him back to Denmark to learn more about the Germans’ boasts of a “super-bomb,” and he transmitted information by radio with the help of Danish Resistance engineer Duus Hansen. However, Sneum’s berth within Britain’s complicated intelligence network was always uneasy. He became fatally entangled in interdepartmental rivalries, and his allegiances were eventually called into question.
Ryan skillfully builds and sustains interest through a narrative that grows increasingly convoluted.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60239-710-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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