A little-known chapter of World War II history with an intriguing American intelligence agent in the leading role.
Fast-paced account of an American woman working with military intelligence who was captured by the Nazis.
Washington Post national security editor Finn (co-author: The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, 2014) follows the story of a rich and adventurous American woman who joined the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, after Pearl Harbor. Born to a wealthy family, Gertrude “Gertie” Legendre (1902-2000) was more interested in outdoor life than socializing, and she became a world-traveling big-game hunter who collected specimens for top museums. But when her husband, Sidney, joined the war effort, she took a job with the OSS, first in Washington, D.C., and then in London. After the liberation of Paris, she found her way to the city and then to the front. However, Allied troops had fallen back from where she thought they were, and she and her companions found themselves under enemy fire and were forced to surrender. She was the first American woman in uniform to be captured by the Germans. From the start, Gertie was suspected of being a spy, kept under close guard, and faced with hard questioning, though never with torture. Finn chronicles her ordeal as she was moved around Germany based on original documents, including Gertie’s own letters and diaries as well as official OSS archives. The result is a fascinating look at the treatment of POWs during the final year of the war—e.g., the hotel reserved for important French hostages where Gertie spent her last few weeks in captivity or the general availability of wine for upper-class prisoners even when there was not enough clean water for washing. The author provides added interest with his profiles of several other figures of historical note, including war photographer Margaret Bourke-White and OSS chief “Wild Bill” Donovan. Finn combines solid research and good storytelling skills to bring Gertie and her era to life for contemporary readers.
A little-known chapter of World War II history with an intriguing American intelligence agent in the leading role.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4733-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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