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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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