Of much interest to serious students of espionage and spy-novel aficionados alike.
A spy comes in from the Cold War, with eye-opening tales to tell.
The son of a high-ranking Stalin-era NKVD officer, Cherkashin grew up one of the Soviet faithful; as a true believer in Communism, he writes, “I’d always felt the difficulties and cruelty I saw . . . were a necessary part of the work it took to shore up our socialist state.” There’s a certain old-school quality to him still, and when Cherkashin turns to telling tales about the well-placed Americans he recruited into the KGB, he reveals an evident pride in his ability to outsmart the assembled CIA, FBI, NSA, and other spooks arrayed against him and his colleagues. His star convert was, of course, Aldrich Ames, who revealed the names of more than twenty agents working inside the Soviet Union, helping dismantle a technologically sophisticated spy network and hampering the effectiveness of US intelligence worldwide. Ames was eventually betrayed, Cherkashin notes, probably by a Soviet agent who defected to what the KGB called “the Main Adversary.” Similarly, most of the double agents working within American intelligence under Cherkashin’s tutelage were exposed in time, just as most of the double agents working behind the Iron Curtain were caught. Though he proudly recounts episodes of trickery, deceit, blackmail, and the like as victories for his team, Cherkashin insists that the act of treason, as evidenced by such agents as Ames, Jonathan Pollard, Oleg Kalugin, Robert Hanssen, and Vitaly Yurchenko, is usually “committed to solve immediate personal problems and is rarely prompted by ideology.” He also notes that it was easy to recruit Americans: just about every double agent under his care came to him willingly, driven by the usual human frailties. Just so, Cherkashin concludes, Americans now regularly betrayed by their own poor intelligence—witness, he writes, the mess in Iraq—should not be too quick to engage in “loud chest thumping” over winning the Cold War, for the Soviet Union, he argues, “ultimately collapsed under its own weight.”
Of much interest to serious students of espionage and spy-novel aficionados alike.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-00968-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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