A compelling biography of a man who was present at the birth of America's foreign intelligence apparatus and went on to run the CIA under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Grose (A Changing Israel, 1985, etc.) demystifies the master spy and presents Dulles the man, brilliant in his career yet quite flawed in his personal life. A former New York Times reporter and managing editor of Foreign Affairs, the author says that he received no cooperation (and thus no censoring) from the CIA for this book. Dulles (18931969), he shows, came from a diplomatic lineage: His brother John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower's secretary of state, a position also held by their grandfather John W. Foster under Benjamin Harrison and by their uncle Robert Lansing under Woodrow Wilson. Nevertheless, it was against the wishes of his father, a Presbyterian minister, that Dulles pursued a career in the foreign service. Grose illustrates the contrast between John, the stern moralist, and his brother Allen, the bon vivant who often ignored his family not only for his work but also for several extramarital affairs. He got his first taste of intelligence work as a junior diplomat during WW I and, after leaving the diplomatic corps in the 1920s, prospered as an international lawyer. When the US entered WW II, Dulles joined the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. The pinnacle of his career came when he was named to head the CIA at the height of the Cold War. Grose details CIA interventions in Guatemala and Iran as well as anti- Soviet intelligence operations. Grose also offers the necessary complement to any biography of Dulles—a thorough examination of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which led to his dismissal by Kennedy, who felt duped by the CIA into backing the anti-Castro invasion. Grose's outstanding study of a remarkable life gives readers insight into both a period of history and the development of the CIA.
Pub Date: Nov. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-51607-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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