A workmanlike reprise of a once-celebrated WW II espionage case, plus an assessment of its geopolitical implications. Drawing on recently declassified archival material, memoirs, interviews with surviving principals, and allied sources, Bearse, a journalist, and Read (coauthor of Kristallnacht, The Deadly Embrace, etc.) provide a comprehensive briefing on the strange career of Tyler Gatewood Kent. The son of a globe-trotting consular official, Kent (a Princeton dropout) won a position in America's Moscow embassy on the strength of his linguistic skills. Thoroughly corrupted during his sojourn in the USSR, Kent (who had been denied advancement to Foreign Service officer) was posted to London as a code clerk shortly after the start of WW II. A virulent anti-Semite with patrician pretensions, he had access to the ultrasecret correspondence between Churchill and FDR. He made copies of these messages and other documents available to Anna Wolkoff, a Russian Çmigre with pro-Fascist leanings who passed them on to Nazi Germany through Italian diplomats. Apprehended by MI5 agents in Mary 1940 as Hitler was smashing through France, Kent was stripped of his immunity by the State Department. He stood trial in camera in the Old Bailey and was convicted on six counts of violating the UK's Official Secrets Act. Sentenced to seven years' penal servitude on the Isle of Wight, Kent returned to the States following his 1945 release. Shortly thereafter, he married a wealthy divorcÇe who kept him in affluent comfort until his death in 1988. While Bearse and Read offer an oddly bloodless account of Kent's treachery, they make a fine job of evaluating the potentially disruptive political consequences of his crimes, including potential damage to FDR's bid for a third presidential terms and to Joseph P. Kennedy's diplomatic career. An intriguing footnote to the history of WW II, then, which is longer on global perspectives than human-scale insights. (Sixteen pages of photographs-not seen.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-385-26261-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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