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
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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