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THE ART OF INTELLIGENCE

Name: THE ART OF INTELLIGENCE
Author: Henry A. Crumpton
ISBN: 978-1-59420-334-3

LESSONS FROM A LIFE IN THE CIA'S CLANDESTINE SERVICE

by Henry A. Crumpton ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2012

Even though heavily vetted, if without the black blocks of many other CIA-related texts, a useful inside look at what goes...

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Indifferently written but nonetheless fascinating glimpse into the CIA’s most secret—and secretive—department.

Crumpton’s quarter-century career with Clandestine Services, he writes, began as a childhood reverie: “As a young boy, I dreamed of becoming a spy.” It took some doing to get recruited, he recounts (“I had no military service, no foreign language, no graduate degree, no technical skill, and no professional pedigree”), but once in, he excelled at the tough physical work required of a CIA agent in the field, adopting the enthusiasm for the mission that long periods spent under difficult circumstances requires. Some of what Crumpton describes is mundane—e.g., the daily administrative affairs that surround spy work, particularly the politics of intelligence. Only when the agency is threatened does he become piqued enough to go beyond colorless descriptions, as when he writes indignantly of the outing of Valerie Plame (a “horrible breach of trust” on the part of the Bush administration). In fairness, the author is also hard on the current administration (“When President Obama assumed office in January 2009, his Justice Department threatened CIA officers with jail—because they had carried out lawful orders under the previous administration”). His narrative is more vivid, if full of expected turns, when he discusses his time in the field as a commander of operations in Afghanistan, battling Taliban and al-Qaida fighters while trying to smoke Osama Bin Laden out of hiding. Of particular interest is his account of the prison uprising that led to the killing of CIA operative Mike Spann in 2001.

Even though heavily vetted, if without the black blocks of many other CIA-related texts, a useful inside look at what goes on behind closed doors—and iron curtains.

Pub Date: May 14, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-59420-334-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.