First-rate reading for fans of cloak-and-dagger stuff, and for students of WWII history.
A lively recounting of America’s shadow war against the Axis powers, fraught with peril, treachery, and bad decisions.
William J. Donovan, a distinguished hero of the Great War, fought an uphill battle to establish a military intelligence unit that worked across service and agency boundaries, but he was vindicated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the aftermath, “Wild Bill’s” fledgling unit was put under the authority of the Joint Chiefs, though given considerable leeway; Donovan used his relative freedom to emphasize an “integrated ‘combined arms’ of shadow war techniques” and to otherwise sharpen the Office of Strategic Service’s skills in the fine arts of “persuasion, penetration and intimidation.” Among OSS’s specialties was a refined understanding of military logistics: its “bespectacled economists, historians, political scientists, and historians” were able to glean considerable intelligence from raw reports and economic data, making the first accurate estimates of such things as German tank production and orders of battle. But, as O’Donnell (Beyond Valor, 2001) writes, drawing on vivid oral histories by unit veterans, OSS types were not all bookworms; hundreds performed heroic and unlikely deeds behind enemy lines, organizing partisan resistance, committing acts of sabotage, and gathering critically important intelligence. One not untypical operative, writes O’Donnell, was a Russian prince who “emigrated to the United States, married an Astor, and became vice president of Hilton International”—and who helped organize the Allied invasion of Sardinia. OSS had its failings, O’Donnell acknowledges, especially in the Pacific Theater and in the Balkans, where operatives missed opportunities to land in Istria and arrive in Vienna before the Soviets—which would have changed the postwar era considerably. Even so, O’Donnell believes, the OSS did well to gather intelligence about the Soviets as well as the Axis, and in the end, he observes, OSS “may have made its greatest contribution, not to winning World War Two, but to winning the Cold War.”
First-rate reading for fans of cloak-and-dagger stuff, and for students of WWII history.Pub Date: March 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3572-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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
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
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