Novelistic, fast-paced history.
Cold War–era CIA intrigue, dramatic and brutal.
Prolific author and reporter Blum tells a striking story, though his breezy narrative may put off readers familiar with more judicious CIA–related books, Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes foremost among them. Blum’s central character is Tennent Bagley of the CIA’s elite Soviet Bloc division. He was working in Switzerland in 1962 when KGB agent Yuri Nosenko offered his services. After interviewing him, Bagley was convinced that Nosenko was precisely who he claimed to be. Promising to deliver secrets, Nosenko returned to Moscow and Bagley to Washington, D.C., where James Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence, suggested that he read the file of Anatoly Golitsyn, another KGB agent who had defected in 1961. To Bagley’s amazement, Golitsyn had recounted incidents and operations identical to Nosenko’s. He concluded that Nosenko was a bogus agent sent to impugn Golitsyn but also that this indicated the presence of a highly placed mole inside the CIA. The plot thickened when Nosenko defected. Flown to the U.S., he responded to Bagley’s questioning with a mixture of boasting, self-promotion, contradictions, and lies, but he insisted that his defection was genuine. Nosenko was locked alone in a small, dark room for more than three years, taken out only for interrogation. Still maintaining his innocence, he received his freedom, an apology, compensation, and permission to remain in the U.S. Unconvinced and certain he was the victim of self-serving CIA politics, Bagley retired only to be galvanized years later by the apparent death of a CIA official, unconvincingly described as a suicide. Although he was barred from CIA archives, he launched an exhaustive search and ultimately concluded that the purported victim, John Paisley, was the mole. Blum admits that nearly everyone involved, Bagley included, was dead when he began his research. While many passages are pure speculation, tolerant readers will enjoy a largely entertaining spy story full of cutthroat CIA infighting and the occasional cut throat.
Novelistic, fast-paced history.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-063-05421-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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