A book that helps make sense of recent headlines and old news alike.
An eye-opening look at the “illegals” and other agents who have been spying for Russia, Soviet and otherwise, over the last several decades in the West.
BBC security correspondent Corera tells a big story in a relatively short space. He opens with a cast of Russian spies trained by the KGB in the latter days of the Soviet Union. “Donald Heathfield…had been born in a cemetery, a ghost rising from the dead,” the author writes of spy Andrey Bezrukov, who took over the identity of a Canadian baby who had died shortly after being born. Each “illegal,” who lived an ordinary life in the West, was a tremendous investment in time and money, with far longer and more extensive training, by Corera’s reckoning, than that of the average CIA or MI6 agent. The great fear was that they would “go native,” finding life in the West more attractive than in the motherland. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the old ways seemed quaint and genteel in the eyes of the new apparatchiks under Vladimir Putin, himself a one-time KGB agent (though not much of one, Corera suggests). That new generation of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, angry that their elders had lost the Cold War, “were determined to restore Russian pride, and they would take the fight to their enemy.” They did, in elaborate games of cat and mouse, with seductive women who nearly snared an Obama Cabinet member in a “honey trap” and with operatives who barely bothered to disguise their identities. One of the latter was Maria Butina. “The information she provided,” writes the author, “was of ‘substantial value,’ and the Russian intelligence services would be able to use it for years to come to identify and target those who might be susceptible to recruitment by trained intelligence officers, according to a former FBI official’s declaration.” The spy ring was eventually broken, mostly thanks to betrayal on the part of Russian insiders rather than homegrown sleuthing.
A book that helps make sense of recent headlines and old news alike.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-288941-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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