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
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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