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GOOD HUNTING

Name: GOOD HUNTING
Author: Jack Devine
ISBN: 978-0-374-13032-9

AN AMERICAN SPYMASTER'S STORY

by Jack Devine Vernon Loeb ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2014

Devine’s attention to detail translates into a finely delineated memoir of his selective undercover tradecraft.

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Veteran CIA covert operative Devine highlights his career foiling trouble from Chile to Afghanistan. The book was co-authored by Houston Chronicle managing editor Loeb (King's Counsel: A Memoir of War, Espionage, and Diplomacy in the Middle East, 2011, etc.).

Devine, now founding partner of the Arkin Group, which specializes in international crisis management, retired from the CIA as acting director of operations in 1998. He is intensely proud of his 32-year career at the agency and of its original noble intent, inherited from Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, to protect the nation’s national security. Refreshingly, Devine, a blue-collar native of suburban Philadelphia who began to ascend the CIA ranks in the late 1960s, does not sugarcoat the various failed schemes directed by U.S. presidents from Nixon to Bush or the enormously damaging, long-running infiltration by moles like Aldrich Ames. Although Devine’s tenure began after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and ended before 9/11, absolving him from much of the criticism that the CIA attracted then, his first tour was in Chile just when the unrest against democratically elected president Salvador Allende got underway in 1973. Although Devine claims the CIA was not involved in the military coup, he admits to a series of destabilizing measures introduced to bring down the socialist-minded regime, at Nixon’s insistence. The author spends a great deal of space discussing his erstwhile colleague Ames, once a friend, who was well into his downward spiral selling secrets to the Soviets in Rome, where Devine was also stationed—as his superior, in fact. Yet when Ames’ perfidy was discovered in 1994, Devine escaped censure and was instead promoted. Working thematically rather than chronologically, Devine explores his stints of glory, namely funneling guns with Charlie Wilson to Afghanistan’s mujahedeen in order to defeat the Soviets and sustaining important relationships with changing directors.

Devine’s attention to detail translates into a finely delineated memoir of his selective undercover tradecraft.

Pub Date: June 3, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-374-13032-9

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: April 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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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.