Hemming has uncovered a man determined not to be known and in so doing, has provided us with delightful reading.
The dramatic story of the remarkable British spymaster who may have been the model for the James Bond character M.
Maxwell Knight (1900-1968) recruited men and women who were quiet but intense, naturalists like him—though he was unlikely to find anyone as devoted to a wide variety of exotic animals. He looked for those who could work unnoticed, efficiently listening, remembering, and reporting what went on in communist and fascist organizations. Searching for a livelihood after World War I, Knight joined Sir George Makgill’s private intelligence agency. Makgill worked for industrialists worried about labor unions and the rise of communism. Knight’s first assignment was to join the British Fascists—which, in the 1920s, was not yet politically abhorrent—and to find potential recruits, an easy task given his mystical magnetism. At this time, he was friends with William Joyce, who would become, during World War II, the treasonous Lord Haw-Haw. They joined the paramilitary wing of the BF, where Knight learned the spy trades of kidnapping and his specialty, breaking and entering. In 1929, Knight was recruited by MI5 to fight communism, eventually leading the M Section. His “grey people” learned to become small and insignificant, remembering everything and hoping no one remembered them. Knight directed his people like he once ran his jazz band: moderating tempo, watching overall direction, and improvising when necessary. Hiring Anna Wolkoff to work as a secretary for the Communist Party was a stroke of genius, helping to break up a spy ring. Knight’s M section was more right-wing, daring, more maverick than others. It was also the most independent, economical, and unconventional. Many spy stories are page-turners, but the author proves that the story of one man can be equally thrilling.
Hemming has uncovered a man determined not to be known and in so doing, has provided us with delightful reading.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-684-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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