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
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
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