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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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