Earley reminds us that Tretyakov is no objective observer—he leans over backward to say nasty things about Russia while...
More outrageous espionage scandal, but this time the CIA and FBI look good.
From 1995 to 2000, Sergei Tretyakov ran Russia’s day-to-day intelligence operations in New York and personally directed every covert operation launched in the city against the United States. At the end of 2000 he defected, then later sat down with investigative journalist and novelist Earley (The Apocalypse Stone, 2006, etc.) to tell this story. Recruited in the 1980s, Tretyakov reveals intriguing behind-the-scenes mechanics of KGB politics, personalities and nuts-and-bolts operation techniques. The foreign-intelligence section did not persecute dissidents inside the USSR, so readers will identify with Tretyakov as he works hard, rises through the ranks and is rewarded with plum assignments in Canada and the United States. Most engrossing are the details of intelligence gathering which he describes, even naming names. Spies were essential, but so were “informational contacts,” academics and bureaucrats who enjoyed chatting and could be manipulated to reveal more than they should. More disturbing is the fact that America’s increasing unpopularity persuaded many foreign officials who don’t consider themselves traitors to pass on damaging secrets simply because they disliked the United States. Earley presents a vivid picture of the shambles that followed the USSR’s 1991 collapse. Tretyakov portrays the leaders as wildly corrupt kleptocrats who were looting the nation to enrich their cronies. An elite force, the intelligence service escaped the general impoverishment but suffered a massive exodus of talent anxious to share the booty. Disgusted at his government and the increasing venality of superiors, Tretyakov began considering his options, but readers will learn few details of his defection, which he was forbidden to discuss.
Earley reminds us that Tretyakov is no objective observer—he leans over backward to say nasty things about Russia while flattering America and himself. Keeping this in mind, readers will encounter plenty of juicy details about Russian intelligence, which still considers America the enemy.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15439-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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