by Peter Grose ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 28, 1994
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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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