A murky effort exacerbated by myriad shadowy agencies and a deeply unsympathetic protagonist.
An obscure wartime spy working for the OSS, the wartime precursor to the CIA, gets a thorough exposé by a government lawyer and former CIA officer.
Bradley’s sense of frustration at how this arrogant, dissembling underling of William Donovan got away with passing information to the Soviet spy network is partly explained by the general atmosphere of fear raging after the war and the fact that the American government had bigger fish to net—e.g., Alger Hiss. Indeed, while Duncan Lee (1913–1988) did not seem to have done harm to the U.S. war effort, he did provide the Soviets with information about OSS internal employees at security risk, thus tipping off the Soviets to the status of their agents. A child of missionary evangelicals in China, a student at Yale in the 1930s and a Rhodes scholar, Lee became politically radicalized at Oxford, largely under the sway of his socialist wife-to-be, Ishbel. Visiting the Soviet Union, he grew infatuated with communism and, in 1937, announced to his horrified parents “in a mixture of scripted lecture and outright rebellion” that he and Ishbel were joining the Communist Party of Great Britain. Back in the U.S., the couple first came under the scrutiny of the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, when their landlady reported their “decidedly pink” views. The outbreak of war brought Lee to Washington to work with Donovan in his new intelligence service, and Lee began passing information to Mary Price, his first handler, a fellow Southerner working for Soviet agent Jacob Golos. From Price, he would be passed to agent Elizabeth Bentley, whose eventual breakdown and confession to the FBI would out Lee and dozens of others, dragging them before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948. Yet Lee’s subsequent work in China funneling arms to Chiang Kai-shek allowed him to fly under the radar of prosecutors.
A murky effort exacerbated by myriad shadowy agencies and a deeply unsympathetic protagonist.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-03009-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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