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A COVERT LIFE

JAY LOVESTONE: COMMUNIST, ANTICOMMUNIST, AND SPY

Pulitzer-winning journalist, biographer, and historian Morgan (A Shovel of Stars: The Making of the American West 1800 to the Present, 1995, etc.) throws scattershot light on 20th-century Communism, labor, and US intelligence through a shadowy figure who passed through all these worlds. Born in Lithuania in 1897, Jacob Liebstein emigrated with his parents to the US at the age of ten and settled on New York’s Lower East Side. Caught up in the fervor of the Russian Revolution, he forsook Judaism, took the name Jay Lovestone, and became a member of the American Communist Party. By the age of 29, his workhorse habits, intellect, and zeal had propelled him to the leadership of the party. But in 1929 he was expelled for defying Joseph Stalin in front of the Comintern Congress. Involuntarily detained in the Soviet Union, Lovestone made a hairbreadth escape. After breaking definitively with Communism, in the early 1940s Lovestone linked up with George Meany, in time becoming the AFL leader’s foreign-policy adviser and liaison to the CIA. Lovestone retained a talent for intrigue and a conspiratorial mindset that led him to collaborate for more than 20 years with CIA spycatcher James Angleton. Often incurring the antipathy of CIA handlers and other labor leaders, the abrasive but effective Lovestone helped splinter off non-Communist union organizers from Moscow-controlled insurgents in France and Italy, and established free trade unions as a bulwark against Stalin in West Germany. In 1974, this unregenerate Cold Warrior was ousted from his AFL-CIO post when his continuing involvement with Angleton was exposed. Morgan has uncovered much in newly opened archives of the Kremlin, FBI surveillance, and Lovestone’s personal papers at the Hoover Institution that will be invaluable to future Cold War historians. But he mixes mindless trivia, say, of his subject’s love life, with items of real significance, and he fails to follow up tantalizing points (e.g., he mentions only in passing that Whittaker Chambers was a Lovestone sympathizer in the 1930s). A revealing and yet at times frustratingly truncated biography of an early American dissident from the God that failed.

Pub Date: March 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-679-44400-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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