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A LIFE IN SECRETS

Name: A LIFE IN SECRETS
Author: Sarah Helm
ISBN: 0-385-50845-X

VERA ATKINS AND THE MISSING AGENTS OF WWII

by Sarah Helm ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 22, 2006

Fans of Len Deighton—and, of course, Fleming—will value this as much as will students of intelligence and...

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Engaging life of the spymistress reputed to have been the model for Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny.

Vera Atkins was far more mysterious than her fictional counterpart, as London-based journalist Helm discovered on meeting her in 1998. Just about to turn 90, Atkins was disinclined to speak openly about her past (“It is something on which I have closed the book,” she grumbled), and she was hostile to nostalgia. Yet, on her death in 2000, she left behind a tantalizing trail of clues, apparently intended for Helm, that, in good spook style, “looked like nothing on first examination but in fact had been deliberately placed to lead the interested party down a particular route.” What Helm knew was that Atkins had been a senior officer in the intelligence organization called the Special Operations Executive, which was charged with inserting secret agents in Nazi-occupied Europe, coordinating their reports and occasionally charging them with tasks such as assassination or sabotage. As it happened, SOE was thoroughly infiltrated, with one particularly nasty French double agent turning over his colleagues to the Gestapo as soon as they landed. Dozens of agents Atkins had recruited and trained were captured. After D-Day, she went looking for them; of particular interest was Nora Inayat Khan, an Indian children’s-book author who was allegedly incapable of telling a lie. What Atkins found in her wanderings through the maze of spydom lends Helm’s narrative the aspect of a taut, well-plotted thriller; what Helm found out with much difficulty about Atkins, a Jewish refugee whom anti-Semitic superiors tried to block and who may have had secret dealings with the Nazis in order to free members of her family from the camps, is constantly surprising.

Fans of Len Deighton—and, of course, Fleming—will value this as much as will students of intelligence and counterintelligence.

Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2006

ISBN: 0-385-50845-X

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.