A military historian uncovers evidence of Ernest Hemingway’s dabbling in espionage.
While working on an exhibition at the CIA Museum, retired Marine Corps and CIA officer Reynolds (U.S. Marines in Iraq, 2003: Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond, 2016) discovered “tantalizing traces” of Hemingway’s involvement in the Office of Strategic Services and Russia’s NKVD, the precursor of the KGB. Beginning with that tenuous evidence, the author has assembled fragments from FBI and NKVD files, sometimes more suggestive than definitive, to create this mostly engrossing story of Hemingway’s disillusionment with American politics, his sympathy with communism, and his attraction to adventure and subversion. Two events changed Hemingway’s political perspective: a devastating hurricane in the Florida Keys in 1935, when the government failed to evacuate stranded World War I veterans, “who died by the hundreds”; and the refusal of the U.S. to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Both made him “passionately pro-Republican and antifascist” and therefore a likely recruit for the NKVD. He seems not to have engaged in much actual spying either for the Soviets or, later, the Americans, to whom he also ferried information. During a trip to China with his wife, Martha Gellhorn, he reported to Washington about “the friction…between the Nationalists and the communists,” information that did not come from secret meetings or stolen papers. In 1942, living in Cuba, he headed what he called the “Crook Factory,” a motley collection of friends who reported to the American ambassador about any odd behavior among German or Spanish businessmen on the island. Like most of his spying activities, this one was short-lived. In his later years, Hemingway became obsessed with the idea that he was under FBI surveillance, and the author speculates that this delusion “deepened his depression and made his final illness worse.”
Although Reynolds is forced to guess about much of Hemingway’s secret life as a spy, his conclusions seem consistent with the well-known portrait of the novelist striving to prove his manliness and power.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-244013-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | MILITARY | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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