A book that amply demonstrates grave flaws in the criminal justice system.
A CIA whistleblower tells his tale.
Sterling, a lawyer who spent eight years in the CIA, relates his life story and the details of what he maintains was a phony conviction for espionage. “During the trial,” he writes, “the government did not present a shred of hard evidence to validate the charges against me. Even [the judge] summarized the case against me as being based on ‘very powerful circumstantial evidence’ rather than on hard proof.” Some readers—e.g., those who condemned Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden—may conclude that the author should not have exposed certain sensitive CIA secrets. However, given his coherent account, backed by copious details (other than a few redactions), most readers will believe that his revelations were warranted. Rather than coming across as a bitter former CIA agent seeking retribution for his imprisonment, Sterling comes across as a reasonable man with a persuasive case that after the CIA hired him, his white supervisors held back promotions solely because he was black. When he sued the CIA for racial discrimination, government officials, including Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, sought to discredit Sterling by alleging espionage. In the first 50 pages of the narrative, the author chronicles his upbringing in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. While some schoolmates and family members considered him too “white” to comfortably hang out with other black students, many whites displayed prejudice against him as a black boy. After noting how he was determined to find a path that suited him, Sterling discusses his undergraduate studies at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, and his law school years at Washington University in St. Louis. While working as a public defender, he jumped at the opportunity to join the CIA after reading a recruitment advertisement. Despite his initial enthusiasm while training at CIA headquarters, Sterling soon saw not only the racial discrimination, but also the strict conservative leanings of most agents and the sometimes damaging incompetence infecting the agency hierarchy.
A book that amply demonstrates grave flaws in the criminal justice system.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-56858-557-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
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
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