Of much interest to serious students of espionage and spy-novel aficionados alike.
A spy comes in from the Cold War, with eye-opening tales to tell.
The son of a high-ranking Stalin-era NKVD officer, Cherkashin grew up one of the Soviet faithful; as a true believer in Communism, he writes, “I’d always felt the difficulties and cruelty I saw . . . were a necessary part of the work it took to shore up our socialist state.” There’s a certain old-school quality to him still, and when Cherkashin turns to telling tales about the well-placed Americans he recruited into the KGB, he reveals an evident pride in his ability to outsmart the assembled CIA, FBI, NSA, and other spooks arrayed against him and his colleagues. His star convert was, of course, Aldrich Ames, who revealed the names of more than twenty agents working inside the Soviet Union, helping dismantle a technologically sophisticated spy network and hampering the effectiveness of US intelligence worldwide. Ames was eventually betrayed, Cherkashin notes, probably by a Soviet agent who defected to what the KGB called “the Main Adversary.” Similarly, most of the double agents working within American intelligence under Cherkashin’s tutelage were exposed in time, just as most of the double agents working behind the Iron Curtain were caught. Though he proudly recounts episodes of trickery, deceit, blackmail, and the like as victories for his team, Cherkashin insists that the act of treason, as evidenced by such agents as Ames, Jonathan Pollard, Oleg Kalugin, Robert Hanssen, and Vitaly Yurchenko, is usually “committed to solve immediate personal problems and is rarely prompted by ideology.” He also notes that it was easy to recruit Americans: just about every double agent under his care came to him willingly, driven by the usual human frailties. Just so, Cherkashin concludes, Americans now regularly betrayed by their own poor intelligence—witness, he writes, the mess in Iraq—should not be too quick to engage in “loud chest thumping” over winning the Cold War, for the Soviet Union, he argues, “ultimately collapsed under its own weight.”
Of much interest to serious students of espionage and spy-novel aficionados alike.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-00968-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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