A compelling biography of a man who was present at the birth of America's foreign intelligence apparatus and went on to run the CIA under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Grose (A Changing Israel, 1985, etc.) demystifies the master spy and presents Dulles the man, brilliant in his career yet quite flawed in his personal life. A former New York Times reporter and managing editor of Foreign Affairs, the author says that he received no cooperation (and thus no censoring) from the CIA for this book. Dulles (18931969), he shows, came from a diplomatic lineage: His brother John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower's secretary of state, a position also held by their grandfather John W. Foster under Benjamin Harrison and by their uncle Robert Lansing under Woodrow Wilson. Nevertheless, it was against the wishes of his father, a Presbyterian minister, that Dulles pursued a career in the foreign service. Grose illustrates the contrast between John, the stern moralist, and his brother Allen, the bon vivant who often ignored his family not only for his work but also for several extramarital affairs. He got his first taste of intelligence work as a junior diplomat during WW I and, after leaving the diplomatic corps in the 1920s, prospered as an international lawyer. When the US entered WW II, Dulles joined the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. The pinnacle of his career came when he was named to head the CIA at the height of the Cold War. Grose details CIA interventions in Guatemala and Iran as well as anti- Soviet intelligence operations. Grose also offers the necessary complement to any biography of Dulles—a thorough examination of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which led to his dismissal by Kennedy, who felt duped by the CIA into backing the anti-Castro invasion. Grose's outstanding study of a remarkable life gives readers insight into both a period of history and the development of the CIA.
Pub Date: Nov. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-51607-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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