by John Smith & Ralph Pezzullo ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2016
A highly amped, ————- book that ———- readers will find...
A heavily redacted tale of how recruiting sources within the Taliban from top-secret CIA encampments in Afghanistan is exhilarating but not conducive to maintaining healthy relationships back home.
Smith, a pseudonym, spent several years on the ground in remote areas of Afghanistan, clashing with agency bureaucracy, growing a large beard, achieving fluency in several dialects of the local language, and occasionally being mistaken for a local. With the aid of Pezzullo, a prolific collaborator on the memoirs of those in Special Forces and the intelligence community (Zero Footprint, 2016, etc.), Smith recounts his swashbuckling exploits in inelegant prose, distinguished chiefly by the conceit that huge amounts of it—lone words, whole paragraphs, occasionally the majority of a page—are visibly redacted. An example: “After a month of playing cowboy, I returned to the daily grind of Langley and started dating a sweet brunette named Hannah, ——— ——————————————— ———————————- ——————— —- ———-. Determined to maintain my cover, I told her, Austin, and my other friends that I worked for a —————— (private company).” Once the author moves from headquarters to the redacted but easily identifiable province in Afghanistan where he was first stationed, the redactions become ever longer and more frequent, leaving major questions for readers. One fully redacted paragraph even has a footnote sourcing the unshown information to a Wikipedia article. While Smith (purportedly) had little difficulty mastering the language and cultivating sources in hostile territory, maintaining his cover for his girlfriends was another matter, and his work led to the demise of multiple romances. Many friends, he learned, “thought I was deliberately being mysterious to make it appear that my life was more interesting than it was. Ironically, some of them thought that I wanted them to think that I was a spy.”
A highly amped, ————- book that ———- readers will find ————.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08136-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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...
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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