An appealing biography of a productive spy.
The story of one of the Soviet Union’s most dangerous spies.
Though the Soviets’ bevy of successful spies no longer provokes outrage, their lives retain an irresistible fascination. Readers who have missed a few earlier biographies of Klaus Fuchs (1911-1988) will not regret this latest by historian Greenspan, whose book The End of the Certain World chronicled the life of Fuchs’ mentor, Max Born. A young mathematical prodigy, Fuchs entered college in 1930. Always an activist, he switched from the Social Democratic Party to the far more energetic Communists and became a leader in opposing, sometimes violently, the burgeoning Nazi student movement. When Hitler took power in 1933, Fuchs fled to Britain, where he obtained a doctorate in physics, impressing everyone with his brilliance. He joined the British atom bomb research project in 1941 despite a security file that expressed concern over his Communist Party membership. Even at this time, he was passing documents to a Soviet controller. When Britain joined the Manhattan Project in 1943, he was one of the first to arrive in the U.S. Sent to Los Alamos, he won praise and remained after the war, returning to Britain in 1946 to become a leader in its nuclear program. By 1949, information from American codebreakers and Soviet defectors pointed to Fuchs as a spy, and he confessed after a few interviews. Greenspan focuses much attention on her subject’s early life, emphasizing his activism over his research and portraying a likable if bland character who regretted only betraying his friends, many of whom remained friends. The Manhattan Project occupies just 30 pages while more than 100 recount Fuchs’ surveillance, interrogation, and trial, a section that offers more detail than some readers will want. Ironically, his greatest regret was not spying or spending nearly a decade in prison but losing his citizenship. He wanted to remain in Britain. After his release, he moved to East Germany, resumed his research, and died full of honors.
An appealing biography of a productive spy.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08339-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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