Many books recount Blunt's espionage; this one is a complete biography that does him justice. (16 illustrations)
British journalist Carter limns the complex life and fascinating times of the eminent art historian best known for being exposed in 1979 as a former Soviet spy.
Entering Cambridge in 1926, Blunt (1907–83) gravitated to the rebellious, esthetic Bloomsbury group that dominated university intellectual life between the wars. Art, not politics, preoccupied him, and his work won plaudits. During the 1930s, the rise of poverty and fascism converted many in Blunt's circle to communism. While a major literary influence, their numbers were small, and their impact on history would have been modest if they hadn’t become spies. Never an activist, Blunt's conversion first showed itself in a temporary switch to Marxist art criticism. (The author devotes fully half her text to his art career.) During the war he worked in MI5, passing thousands of documents to his Soviet handler. Carter has assimilated the massive and often unreliable literature on espionage to produce an authoritative and often hilarious account of this period. Eager British spies deluged Moscow with secret documents; Soviet officials assumed it was too good to be true, but eventually they realized they had a gold mine. The workaholic Blunt continued his art studies during the war and wrote several important books. Afterward, he drifted away from espionage, but a faint cloud of suspicion dogged him, especially after Burgess and Maclean defected in 1951. When his secret was revealed nearly three decades later, he became a pariah. Besides passing information, he was accused of being a predatory homosexual and a pedophile, plagiarizing from students, authenticating forgeries for profit, cheating friends out of priceless paintings. He consulted his lawyer about suing for libel and was told his actions had defamed his name so badly that no further defamation was possible.
Many books recount Blunt's espionage; this one is a complete biography that does him justice. (16 illustrations)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-10531-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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
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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