Entertaining for both its historical insights into WWII and its dramatic narrative.
A doozy of a dossier on Allen Dulles and his early days spying during World War II.
As recounted by former Wall Street Journal correspondent Miller (The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century, 2011), before orchestrating coups in places like Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba, Dulles was a dashing and dedicated operative for the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) charged with helping to keep tabs on Hitler and his Nazi henchmen. Although officially neutral, the Swiss city from which Dulles operated, Bern, was replete with double agents, moles, and spies of every stripe. It wasn’t long before Dulles learned about the powerful resistance groups within Germany and the German military itself who were bent on assassinating Hitler. One such character was the intriguing Hans Bernd Gisevius, a member of the German military intelligence who hated Nazis but also had a book he desperately wanted published. There was also American heiress Mary Bancroft, a globe-trotting socialite with an exquisite taste for danger: “Believing as I did that Jean was a Turk, I fancied myself in some mysterious kind of danger. A delicious thought.” The trio formed an incongruous undercover operation sharing secrets and sex. Dulles never missed a beat as he drew closer to the Valkyrie plot to blow up Hitler inside the “Wolf’s Lair” at Rastenburg, East Prussia. However, the future head of the CIA had more on his mind than knocking out Hitler or sleeping with Bancroft. Convinced that Stalin and the communists wanted to carve up Europe to their liking after the war ended, Dulles fought hard to warn the U.S. government of the coming Red Menace and craft the response that would shape America’s future over the next 70 years. To augment his rapid-fire spy story, Miller also supplies a timeline, a list of principal characters, and a brief closing section regarding the fates of the primary characters.
Entertaining for both its historical insights into WWII and its dramatic narrative.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9338-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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