An appealing biography of a productive spy.
The story of one of the Soviet Union’s most dangerous spies.
Though the Soviets’ bevy of successful spies no longer provokes outrage, their lives retain an irresistible fascination. Readers who have missed a few earlier biographies of Klaus Fuchs (1911-1988) will not regret this latest by historian Greenspan, whose book The End of the Certain World chronicled the life of Fuchs’ mentor, Max Born. A young mathematical prodigy, Fuchs entered college in 1930. Always an activist, he switched from the Social Democratic Party to the far more energetic Communists and became a leader in opposing, sometimes violently, the burgeoning Nazi student movement. When Hitler took power in 1933, Fuchs fled to Britain, where he obtained a doctorate in physics, impressing everyone with his brilliance. He joined the British atom bomb research project in 1941 despite a security file that expressed concern over his Communist Party membership. Even at this time, he was passing documents to a Soviet controller. When Britain joined the Manhattan Project in 1943, he was one of the first to arrive in the U.S. Sent to Los Alamos, he won praise and remained after the war, returning to Britain in 1946 to become a leader in its nuclear program. By 1949, information from American codebreakers and Soviet defectors pointed to Fuchs as a spy, and he confessed after a few interviews. Greenspan focuses much attention on her subject’s early life, emphasizing his activism over his research and portraying a likable if bland character who regretted only betraying his friends, many of whom remained friends. The Manhattan Project occupies just 30 pages while more than 100 recount Fuchs’ surveillance, interrogation, and trial, a section that offers more detail than some readers will want. Ironically, his greatest regret was not spying or spending nearly a decade in prison but losing his citizenship. He wanted to remain in Britain. After his release, he moved to East Germany, resumed his research, and died full of honors.
An appealing biography of a productive spy.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08339-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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