The fraught spy game ably viewed as historical artifact and—thanks to Russia, China, and others—ongoing concern.
An eye-opening look at the mechanics of espionage, Soviet-style.
In 1960, an age of abundant cocktails and government offices whose “air was often fuggy from cigarettes,” British and American intelligence cracked a ring of spies operating in the U.K. The chief operative was a British citizen named Harry Houghton, who had been sent home from a post in Poland because of his pattern of heavy drinking. He was assigned to an office that oversaw British submarine activities, handling sensitive information that he handed on to a Soviet handler for the oldest of reasons: After having served time in prison, he “confessed that he had spied ‘for money,’ but refused to disclose how much he had been paid.” Divorced from a wife who tipped off intelligence agents to the fact that Houghton “was divulging secret information to people who ought not to get it,” Houghton recruited a paramour and worked with another couple who, it turns out, were American Communists who had fled the U.S. a step ahead of the FBI, though they had long managed to evade capture. As Barnes writes in this entertaining thriller, the members of the so-called Portland Spy Ring “were arrested at a pivotal moment in the Cold War,” a time marked by the quickening space race and, soon, the Cuban missile crisis and other moments when hot war nearly broke out. The American agents and their Soviet handler were exchanged, though, for British spies the Russians had captured. On his death, that handler was declared a hero—and not by the Soviets but instead by Boris Yeltsin, the first president of supposedly democratic Russia. The author does a good job of showing how Soviet intelligence used death records, stolen passports, and other instruments to plant spies throughout the West, and fans of Furst, Ludlum, and their kind will find this real-world exploration of old-school espionage suitably intriguing.
The fraught spy game ably viewed as historical artifact and—thanks to Russia, China, and others—ongoing concern.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06285-699-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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