An eye-widening look inside one of America's most notorious spy cases. Veteran New York Times reporters Weiner, Johnston, and Lewis portray the CIA as populated by mediocre career bureaucrats more concerned with self-preservation than with doing the organization's legally mandated job. Given this climate, it comes as no surprise that Aldrich Ames, a severely alcoholic, astonishingly incompetent, midlevel, office-bound spook, should have risen to head the counterintelligence branch of the CIA's central Soviet division, where in 1983 ``he began calling for the files on every important CIA operation involving Soviet spies in every corner of the world.'' Ames sold critical government secrets to the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with what he regarded to be his lowly station, he turned to a quick source of cash—the KGB—to fund his expensive tastes in clothing, housing, food, drink, and companions during his postings in places like Mexico City and Rome. The information he supplied the Soviets led directly to the destruction of a network of double agents with James Bondish code names like Tickle, Jogger, and Top Hat; his treason earned Ames nearly $3 million before his arrest and conviction for espionage in 1994. Although he was brazenly careless about his new wealth, the authors write, the CIA took years to wonder how Ames could afford an expensive home in a Washington, D.C., suburb and frequent weekend trips to Europe, questions that could have been answered ``by the kind of credit check millions of Americans undergo each year.'' If we trust the authors' depiction of a branch of government gone far out of control, it's amazing that the agency ever caught up with Ames at all. This suspenseful book, based on interviews with key players, including Ames himself, lends powerful ammunition to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's argument that the CIA has seen its day and should be abolished. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-44050-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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
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
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