The most careful assessment to date of one of the most successful spy rings ever. The career of Richard Sorge, the son of a German father and a Russian mother, was filled with paradox. He fought bravely in the German army during the First World War and was wounded three times. He became a committed communist after the war, but his wounds served to inoculate him from the suspicions of the German officers among whom he worked as a journalist in Tokyo from 1933 to 1941. His Soviet spy ring, using both Japanese and Germans, was often better informed than the German Embassy, which leaned heavily on his expertise, the ambassador even allowing him to use the embassy code books. He warned the Soviet Union of the impending German attack, almost to the day, only to have his warning regarded by Stalin as a provocation. He was almost ludicrously indiscreet in his conversation, was frequently drunk, and even seduced the ambassador’s wife, but the sheer recklessness of his conduct served somehow to insulate him from suspicion. And when he was finally caught, the Soviets allowed their most successful spy to be hanged rather than save someone who knew the full extent of Stalin’s blunder. This account, by the Tokyo correspondent of the Times of London, is the first to use both the Russian Defense Ministry and KGB files, German diplomatic archives, and Japanese and German memoirs and official records, even including the account of his career written by Sorge in prison. Whymant believes that Sorge’s information made it safe for the Soviets to transfer their troops from the Japanese to the German front, and hence stem the tide at last. Hence the final paradox that, by helping to stop Hitler, his greatest service may have been to the West. A judicious and often gripping account of a spy who, in his own words, penetrated the hard shell of Japanese society, and found that it was soft inside.
Pub Date: Dec. 23, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-19339-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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