An exciting tale of cutting-edge espionage and a rueful account of how political exigencies can blunt tradecraft’s...
Tense memoir of a CIA analyst’s pursuit of terrorists in the post–9/11 era.
In her debut, Bakos shares her insider’s view of analytical tradecraft, set against the unraveling of civil order in Iraq. In her position, she “focused on whether there was a connection between Iraq and al Qaida,” especially regarding “the movement sparked by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” the “godfather of terrorism in Iraq.” Her unusual background underscores the unique qualities of intelligence officers, who “worked in quiet obscurity” to guard against the mass-casualty attacks that al-Zarqawi popularized in Iraq. Growing up in rural Montana, where “self-reliance was less an ethos than an expectation,” Bakos joined the CIA’s human resources division and then transitioned into the Career Analyst Program after 9/11. Following the Bush administration’s focus on Iraq, she spent time in Baghdad, observing the insurgency’s beginnings. She realized that al-Zarqawi’s hybrid terror group al-Qaida in Iraq could potentially destabilize the country, so he remained her focus once back at Langley, where her briefings routinely reached the White House. Frustrated by the disconnect between their meticulous analysis and the flawed military actions that followed, she recalls her unit’s camaraderie: “We were on a misfit island of targeters within a larger Agency that didn’t understand how to embrace our work.” Still, she notes that the team dynamic could not survive the grueling pace and increasingly uncertain goals of the occupation. She left the unit in 2006 yet remained haunted by her targeting experience. In an epilogue, she describes coming to terms with PTSD and unwelcome publicity from a congressional report on the CIA’s treatment of detainees. Ultimately, she writes, the terrorist leader’s death “did not signal an immediate downturn in violence.” Bakos writes with the careful discretion of CIA retirees, but her revelations are relevant and unsettling given the continued menace of mass-casualty terrorism and political overreaction.
An exciting tale of cutting-edge espionage and a rueful account of how political exigencies can blunt tradecraft’s effectiveness.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-26047-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 11, 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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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