Occasionally breathless and torrid in description, this is a well-documented work that certainly never bores.
Fascinating portrait of an accidental but very effective female American spy at the fraught early stages of World War II.
Vanity Fair contributing editor Blum (Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America, 2014, etc.) finds an intriguing, beguiling subject in Betty Pack, the Minneapolis-born wife of a British diplomatic functionary who fell into the world of espionage. Born Amy Elizabeth Thorpe to a Marine father and Minnesota bluestocking mother, Pack, “by nature a restless and solitary girl,” married the British diplomat Arthur Pack out of desperation in 1930, not only because of her pregnancy, but also to escape the provincial U.S. and see the world. After a diplomatic stint in Chile, when she recognized that she and her husband were fatally incompatible, and then Madrid, she became radicalized by the Spanish Civil War. Though she sympathized with the Fascists, she had to play both sides in order to secure supplies for the rebels as well as spring her lover from prison. At her husband’s next posting, in Warsaw, Pack was recruited into British intelligence, specifically William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination, which wanted desperately to know about the Polish attempts to crack the German Enigma code. With her excellent diplomatic cover and her reckless highflying flair, which Blum portrays with brio, Pack was enlisted to seduce high-level Polish official Count Michal Lubienski, among others. Posted next to Washington, D.C., Pack was ordered to use her skills at “discreet entertaining” to get possession of the Italian naval cipher, which she dutifully accomplished by bedding the Italian naval attaché Alberto Lais. Subsequently, and rather incredibly, she was able to break into the Vichy French Embassy and secure their naval ciphers. Reading more like a suspense novel than history, Blum’s account brings an unsung heroine to vivid life.
Occasionally breathless and torrid in description, this is a well-documented work that certainly never bores.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-230767-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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