Reads like a fine spy novel whose ending we know but whose story transports us nonetheless.
The intense and intimate story of espionage involving Soviet and American agents; one of the latter was the author’s father.
Dillon, a veteran journalist who served as the president of Reader’s Digest and has worked for Vogue, Harper’s, the New Yorker, and other publications, debuts with a tale full of intrigue, ignorance, treason, treachery, family, greed, and loyalty—to country, to lucre, to human rights. The author tells us about two families: her own and that of Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a high-ranking Soviet intelligence official, who, for decades, shared critical information with his American counterparts, including Dillon’s father. With detail and technique that are almost novelistic, the author alternates the stories of the two families and describes her awareness, much later on, that her father was a CIA agent. Appearing in the text are some names familiar to followers of spy stories: Kim Philby, Philip Agee, and, most grievously in this particular story, Aldrich Ames. Using multiple interviews of principals and her comprehensive research, Dillon shows the internecine battles within the CIA, the fierce paranoia evident among many on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and the failure of intelligence officials to see the traitorous behavior that, in some cases, was flaring prominently. Ames, for example, was living a life that was far beyond his means, yet it took years for his superiors to catch on; likewise, the Soviets could not believe that a decorated hero like Polyakov would betray his country. Throughout the narrative, the author weaves the personal family stories of both of her principals—her own, of course, but she awards special attention to Polyakov’s son, Alexander, who also was working in intelligence but was unaware of his father’s alliances. We know the outcomes, so the dramatic irony is piercing.
Reads like a fine spy novel whose ending we know but whose story transports us nonetheless.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-238588-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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