An eye-widening look inside one of America's most notorious spy cases. Veteran New York Times reporters Weiner, Johnston, and Lewis portray the CIA as populated by mediocre career bureaucrats more concerned with self-preservation than with doing the organization's legally mandated job. Given this climate, it comes as no surprise that Aldrich Ames, a severely alcoholic, astonishingly incompetent, midlevel, office-bound spook, should have risen to head the counterintelligence branch of the CIA's central Soviet division, where in 1983 ``he began calling for the files on every important CIA operation involving Soviet spies in every corner of the world.'' Ames sold critical government secrets to the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with what he regarded to be his lowly station, he turned to a quick source of cash—the KGB—to fund his expensive tastes in clothing, housing, food, drink, and companions during his postings in places like Mexico City and Rome. The information he supplied the Soviets led directly to the destruction of a network of double agents with James Bondish code names like Tickle, Jogger, and Top Hat; his treason earned Ames nearly $3 million before his arrest and conviction for espionage in 1994. Although he was brazenly careless about his new wealth, the authors write, the CIA took years to wonder how Ames could afford an expensive home in a Washington, D.C., suburb and frequent weekend trips to Europe, questions that could have been answered ``by the kind of credit check millions of Americans undergo each year.'' If we trust the authors' depiction of a branch of government gone far out of control, it's amazing that the agency ever caught up with Ames at all. This suspenseful book, based on interviews with key players, including Ames himself, lends powerful ammunition to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's argument that the CIA has seen its day and should be abolished. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-44050-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
