Fans of Len Deighton—and, of course, Fleming—will value this as much as will students of intelligence and...
Engaging life of the spymistress reputed to have been the model for Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny.
Vera Atkins was far more mysterious than her fictional counterpart, as London-based journalist Helm discovered on meeting her in 1998. Just about to turn 90, Atkins was disinclined to speak openly about her past (“It is something on which I have closed the book,” she grumbled), and she was hostile to nostalgia. Yet, on her death in 2000, she left behind a tantalizing trail of clues, apparently intended for Helm, that, in good spook style, “looked like nothing on first examination but in fact had been deliberately placed to lead the interested party down a particular route.” What Helm knew was that Atkins had been a senior officer in the intelligence organization called the Special Operations Executive, which was charged with inserting secret agents in Nazi-occupied Europe, coordinating their reports and occasionally charging them with tasks such as assassination or sabotage. As it happened, SOE was thoroughly infiltrated, with one particularly nasty French double agent turning over his colleagues to the Gestapo as soon as they landed. Dozens of agents Atkins had recruited and trained were captured. After D-Day, she went looking for them; of particular interest was Nora Inayat Khan, an Indian children’s-book author who was allegedly incapable of telling a lie. What Atkins found in her wanderings through the maze of spydom lends Helm’s narrative the aspect of a taut, well-plotted thriller; what Helm found out with much difficulty about Atkins, a Jewish refugee whom anti-Semitic superiors tried to block and who may have had secret dealings with the Nazis in order to free members of her family from the camps, is constantly surprising.
Fans of Len Deighton—and, of course, Fleming—will value this as much as will students of intelligence and counterintelligence.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-50845-X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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