Thoroughly researched, fluid and compelling.
The author of three previous accounts of World War II espionage (The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, 2008, etc.) returns with the story of the Childs and their associates during their turbulent, eventful years with the Office of Strategic Services.
Although her title identifies the Childs as her focus, Conant devotes even more attention to the puzzling case of Jane Foster, friend of the Childs and fellow OSS operative later indicted as a Soviet spy. It’s hard not to notice Foster—wealthy, attractive, flighty, loquacious, and “impossible to resist.” The author is certainly interested in Paul and Julia Child—their backgrounds, protracted courtship, wartime activities, postwar lives and Julia’s emergence as a celebrity author and TV personality. But Conant continually returns to the charisma and conundrums of Foster. Was she just irresponsible? Capricious? Careless? Or was she truly ensnared in a vast web of deceit spun by the KGB? The author concludes that Foster was either strikingly dense or actually culpable—near the end she calls her a liar and a “snob to the core.” Conant begins her tale in 1955 when Paul Child, called to Washington for what he thought was a promotion in the United States Information Service, discovered, instead, that he must undergo hours of interrogation. The government was seeking out crypto-Commies—was Paul one? His wife? And what about Jane Foster? Conant then sweeps back into the chaotic days of Wild Bill Donovan and the creation of the OSS, its recruitment of the principals, their activities during the war and their subsequent lives, loves and enterprises. Conant reveals both indignity at the excesses of McCarthyism and disgust with those who committed betrayal.
Thoroughly researched, fluid and compelling.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6352-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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