An intriguing but minor testament to the persistence of old-school military espionage.
The story of a millennial who became an informant for the FBI.
Jamali is straightforward in setting up his unusual tale: “For three nerve-wracking years, I spied on America for the Russians…[as] a double agent working closely with the FBI. The Cold War wasn’t really over. It had just gone high-tech.” After a brisk opening in which the author passes classified training manuals to a Russian military-intelligence officer, he settles into a long discussion of his second-generation immigrant upbringing and aimless 20s. Although his French and Pakistani academic parents thrived by operating a research clearinghouse service, Jamali lacked ambition, until 9/11 inspired in him the desire to become a naval intelligence officer. “I was eager to do something more meaningful than running the business,” he writes. Jamali found an opportunity to improve his prospects in Oleg, a U.N.–based Russian intelligence officer. His parents had updated the FBI on Russian purchases since the 1980s, but the author decided to accelerate the relationship. He sold himself to his parents’ FBI contacts as an asset, able to prod the Russians toward illicit pursuit of classified military documents. At first bemused by his go-getter attitude, the FBI soon encouraged him, giving him tradecraft tips and a watch with a hidden digital recorder. After a long series of gradually escalated handoffs to Oleg, the FBI abruptly wrapped up the operation by pretending to arrest Jamali in front of the diplomat (who walked away)—to Jamali’s dismay: “I thought we’d been aiming big and thinking long term.” Although Jamali received his naval commission and rare plaudits from the FBI, the narrative feels plodding, padded by such gambits as discussions of his love for spy movies and exotic cars. Prolific co-author Henican (Amish Confidential, 2015, etc.) gives the prose a slick feel, but he errs in not developing a fuller look at the wider geopolitical moment to which this youthful spy wannabe was responding.
An intriguing but minor testament to the persistence of old-school military espionage.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8882-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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