Intriguing but lacking the salacious detail and hard evidence necessary for true fascination.
An attempt to introduce the world to a female spy far more successful than Mata Hari and just as captivating.
Moura Zakrevskaya (1891-1974) was born in Ukraine to a family with land, wealth, and a connection to the czar. Despite her origins, her instinct for survival and a liberal political temperament led her to spy for the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. After leaving Russia in 1921, though, evidence of her continued spy activity is largely circumstantial. She was often in the right place at the right time to engage in espionage; travel in and out of restricted areas was frequently easier than seemed legitimate; and both the general gossip and the files kept by European governments concluded that she was likely a spy for one entity or another for most of her life. For the most part, McDonald (The Prince, His Tutor and the Ripper: The Evidence Linking James Kenneth Stephen to the Whitechapel Murders, 2007, etc.) and Dronfield (The Locust Farm, 2013, etc.) craft a colorful tale, but they impart little of the urgency that makes spy stories so successful. Combined with the amount of historical and familial detail necessary to make sense of Zakrevskaya’s life, this makes for an informative but rarely thrilling read. The biography is thorough for a subject as careful and secretive as an assumed spy, and while the authors make an effective argument that their subject lived a double life, there is little payoff in terms of hard documentation. Prodigious research and endnotes prove mostly that Zakrevskaya was incredibly effective at survival, generally through her many relationships and affairs. The story retains an air of mystery, much like the woman herself, but in a work promising “the lives, loves and lies of Russia’s most seductive spy,” that mysterious nature is more disappointing than tantalizing.
Intriguing but lacking the salacious detail and hard evidence necessary for true fascination.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78074-708-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
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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