Fans of Graham Greene and Alan Furst will revel in this well-told true-life story.
An unlikely tale of true espionage by London-based journalist/historian Hemming (Abdulnasser Gharem: Art of Survival, 2012, etc.) in which a nerdy Jewish kid becomes a kind of James Bond.
Geoffrey Pyke (1893-1948) found his calling in the face of Nazi Germany’s official anti-Semitism. He did not forget that as a British POW in Germany in World War I, though, he had been confined to a barracks reserved for Jews—and not by Germans but by his fellow British officers, masters of “the casual anti-Semitism of Edwardian England.” Still, he remained a loyal servant of the empire, gathering valuable intelligence that would have earned him a firing squad as a spy. Convinced that the educational orthodoxy was misguided, Pyke also attempted to start a network of schools to be funded by his wizardry in the stock market. Convinced that it was not enough to defeat the Nazis but to “make fools of them in beating them,” he gained the confidence of Winston Churchill and cooked up some elaborately improbable technologies, including “an unsinkable aircraft carrier made out of a cheap new material that could be produced quickly.” Along the way, Pyke fell into the communist orbit. “I am primarily an anti-fascist,” he insisted, but he would have been a candidate for execution by his own country had he not beaten his pursuers to the punch. Hemming examines the facts, augmented by “the release of previously classified documents by MI5,” surrounding the Pyke affair, suggesting that while his subject, a tinkerer and discoverer, journalist, and genius indeed, had given material aid to the Soviets, he may not have been so deeply involved as was supposed. Pyke has been dead for nearly 70 years, so modest rehabilitation is of less interest than the fascinating story surrounding his deeds—for, as Time noted, killing himself “was the only unoriginal thing he had ever done.”
Fans of Graham Greene and Alan Furst will revel in this well-told true-life story.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-577-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
