A gripping espionage yarn that happily contradicts the authors’ advice for crafting a cover story: “Make it boring as hell.”
A fast-paced account of an effort to root out a mole and recruit double agents in an unnamed enemy nation.
Owing to CIA censorship, the Bustamantes, married former agents, can’t name the country on which this narrative centers. “But we can tell you,” they write, “that it’s a place with centuries of history, a vibrant culture, a wonderful people…and a government implacably opposed to the United States and its allies.” Given that the country would appear to be European and mildly prosperous, one might make an educated guess, but that’s not really important. What is important is that the country they call Falcon had an intelligence service so highly developed that traditional methods of spycraft were hobbled, leading to a brilliant solution: Decentralize their spy network so that it resembled a terrorist cell, with each member holding only need-to-know information. On that score, one of the most exciting episodes in a book full of them is Andrew’s skin-of-his-teeth escape from Falcon after almost certainly having been betrayed by an American agent code-named Scimitar, who did so for the oldest reason there is: He needed money. The adventures and misadventures are plentiful here, but of equally great interest to readers are the authors’ lucid explanations of how spycraft proceeds to begin with. In the business of recruiting well-connected Falconians to spill state secrets, for instance, the first step is to gain the subject’s attention more or less accidentally, and then turn up at the same coffee shop or store and, in time, strike up a conversation. Phrase three? Forge a true friendship, a particularly American approach. “Most of the time, the relationships between our case officers and their Falcon contacts are genuine—not fake or transactional.” It’s just the thing for a budding spy to learn.
A gripping espionage yarn that happily contradicts the authors’ advice for crafting a cover story: “Make it boring as hell.”Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780316572149
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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