The avalanche of minutiae only underscores the tenuousness of the assertions, and the tale drifts along on Maxwell’s...
A shaky case that British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, a giant in his own eyes if not his bankers’, might have been given some help in dying when he tumbled from his yacht off the Canaries in 1991.
Thomas (Gideon’s Spies, 1999, etc.) and Dillon (The Dirty War, 1999, etc.) have both long been writing on the nasty subterranean world of intelligence operations, and here they posit that Maxwell did not drown at all, but rather was the object of an Israeli hit squad after he, ostensibly, threatened Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, with disclosing their joint activities if they didn’t pony up some big money to stave off Maxwell’s creditors. It was no secret that Maxwell was a friend of the Israeli state, dishing out financial advice and assistance with largesse, but he was also the Israelis’ conduit for disseminating a leading-edge piece of surveillance software to secret-service organizations in places like Canada, the old USSR, Zimbabwe, and Guatemala (even Osama bin Laden ultimately got one). Mossad had tricked out the software with a “trapdoor” that would allow them to listen in. Obvious fans of the spy game, Thomas and Dillon lard the story with loads of peripheral intelligence details, perhaps fascinating but not germane; address Maxwell’s many financial shenanigans; and delve into vile details his personal hygiene, all to keep up the reader’s interest in what amounts to the unscintillating tale of the Mossad using a friend to gain access to high places. There is just no conclusive proof that Maxwell died after being injected with a “lethal nerve agent.”
The avalanche of minutiae only underscores the tenuousness of the assertions, and the tale drifts along on Maxwell’s paranoia, bullying, and general unpleasantness, so undesirable a character that readers won’t care how he met his end, just as long as he did. (8-page photo insert)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1078-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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