As exciting as any good spy thriller—but it’s all true.
Intelligence researcher Hayes opens the door on the fascinating life of one of England's greatest spies, Daphne Park (1921-2010).
Unlocking that door is an achievement in itself. The author was able to interview her subject after her retirement from the British Secret Intelligence Service after receiving a life peerage to add to her Order of the British Empire award. Of course, given that her life’s work was espionage, the story she told was sparse. Hayes uncovered further information from retired colleagues from Oxford, the British government, SIS, the CIA, and even the KGB. Raised in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) by British parents, she was sent to England for school at age 11 and ended up at Somerville College, Oxford. She left Oxford in 1943 and joined the Special Operations Executive, eventually working with Operation Jedburgh paratroopers until the end of the war. Park had to be patient and extremely persistent in her work, but she succeeded in getting a place in the SIS. She served in Moscow, Congo, Zambia, and Hanoi, as well as three months in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on an unknown operation. She eventually rose to the most senior operational rank in SIS. That list of her assignments is misleadingly simple, as she was always in the right place at the right time: Moscow during the Suez crisis; Leopoldville for the post-colonial face-off in Africa and the murder of Patrice Lumumba; Lusaka for the Rhodesian declaration of independence. Hayes had access to the recent history of England’s secret service, and she uses it to great effect. This is an excellent biography of a remarkable woman who easily built relationships to safeguard foreign policy objectives. She was forthright and obdurate, and she had an infectious sense of humor. Most importantly, she personified the qualities required: loyalty, respect, tradition, and absolute secrecy.
As exciting as any good spy thriller—but it’s all true.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1268-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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