A solid if sometimes plodding account, of much interest to students of espionage and counterintelligence.
A tale of the tangled web spun by a Briton who spied for the Soviet Union and ended his days in Moscow exile.
Less cynical, and perhaps less effective, than his contemporaries Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, fellow members of the spy ring that came to be called the Cambridge Five, Donald Maclean (1913-1983) was a true believer in the communist cause. After defecting to the Soviet Union, he wrote to his mother that he had “done nothing of which I am ashamed and of which you need be ashamed for me.” The British government felt differently, of course. Philipps, whose grandfather worked alongside Maclean in the Foreign Office, turns in a careful though fairly bland study of Maclean and his motivations, which, though apparently pure, were given a desperate edge by a long dependence on alcohol. As the author writes, if the Cambridge University of the 1920s was a broadly conservative place, by the 1930s, in the words of the poet Julian Bell, “a very large majority of the more intelligent undergraduates are Communists, or almost Communists.” That was certainly true of Maclean, who otherwise had few of the psychological markers that Soviet spy recruiters sought—e.g., low self-esteem and distance among family members. Maclean was a solid performer as a spy, heeding instructions not to socialize with his fellow spooks inasmuch as it was “against Soviet tradecraft to allow social contacts between agents,” even as Philby and Burgess broke that rule by living together. Maclean performed his government job well, too, leading to a posting in Washington, D.C., where he enjoyed “unparalleled access…[in] the hub of the Western allies in the rapidly burgeoning Cold War.” Even so, writes Philipps, the Soviets were careful to shield him from the likes of Alger Hiss, the Venona project, and other spy operations.
A solid if sometimes plodding account, of much interest to students of espionage and counterintelligence.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-60857-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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