A competently written story that limns the complex spy-vs.-spy calculus of a time still fresh in memory.
Prolific biographer Secrest (Elsa Schiaparelli, 2014, etc.) delves into a remote corner of Cold War history.
Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960) was a man of parts: an intellectual, a devotee of careful planning, a socialist at a time in Italy during which the capitalist economy was controlled by “a tiny elite group of allies who held key minority positions in each others’ companies.” His evolution was not without its checkered elements; he went along with Mussolini’s fascist government for a time, as an expedient, while other family members took an active role in the resistance and helped smuggle Jews out of the country. Yet a socialist he was, with a vision of a postwar nation that did not quite square with that of the American government—in particular, CIA director Allen Dulles, who favored “a double agent ready for action, not an ambitious, left-leaning industrialist who wanted to impose upon American policy his plan for a new Italy, ad nauseam.” Olivetti soon went on to take his firm, renowned for its typewriters, into the realm of electronics, developing a mainframe computer, “the first fully transistorized one in the world," that threatened the near monopoly IBM enjoyed on such machines. (Later, Olivetti developed a portable calculator so closely emulated by HP that the Italian company launched and won a copyright suit.) Word came that Olivetti wasn’t reluctant to sell the technology to Russia and China, among other potential customers, and not long after, Olivetti was dead, the victim of a heart attack when presumed in the prime of health. A year and a half later, his chief technologist and designer died in a suspicious car crash. Did American intelligence do these dirty deeds? It’s not outside the realm of possibility; after all, Secrest writes, the Russians likely assassinated two American scientists involved in missile guidance systems. That much of the author’s argument proceeds by inference and suggestion doesn’t diminish its plausibility.
A competently written story that limns the complex spy-vs.-spy calculus of a time still fresh in memory.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49365-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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