Lowbrow history but an entertaining story of skulduggery in a WWII backwater.
The story of Hitler’s 1943 effort to assassinate the three world leaders at their conference in Tehran.
The plot was announced by the notoriously paranoid Stalin, who urged Franklin Roosevelt to move to the well-bugged Soviet Embassy. After a review of Nazi intelligence leaders and their well-documented, generally disastrous, covert operations, journalist Blum introduces his hero, Secret Service agent Mike Reilly, who was obsessively concerned about protecting FDR and accompanied him and worried intensely as the plot unfolded. The author concentrates on events in Iran, a neutral during World War II. In the early fall of 1941, two months after Germany attacked Russia, Britain and Russia invaded, ostensibly to fend off Nazi influence but in reality to ensure Britain’s access to Iranian oil and protect the Trans-Iranian Railway, a major route of supplies to the Soviet army. According to Blum (and a 2003 Russian history loudly promoted by that country’s intelligence service), Operation Long Jump, a Nazi operation to assassinate the three leaders, was already in the works when news that they would meet in Tehran pushed it into high gear. Most of the book concerns the operation in which several heavily armed Nazi teams parachuted into Iran with plans to meet up with agents, infiltrate the embassy through an unguarded water tunnel, overwhelm the guards, and murder the leaders. But Soviet spies gave plenty of advance warning, allowing Stalin’s forces to deal with them. Few survived. The existence of Long Jump remains controversial among historians, except those in Russia. Blum acknowledges this, emphasizing that he “wanted to write a suspenseful, character-driven story of men, heroes and villains, caught up in a tense, desperate time who needed to find the courage and cunning to do their duty for their countries and to fulfill their own sense of honor.” The result is a breathless drama in novelistic form with insight into the characters’ conversations, thoughts, and emotions.
Lowbrow history but an entertaining story of skulduggery in a WWII backwater. (8-page b/w photo insert)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287289-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Harari delivers yet another tour de force.
A highly instructive exploration of “current affairs and…the immediate future of human societies.”
Having produced an international bestseller about human origins (Sapiens, 2015, etc.) and avoided the sophomore jinx writing about our destiny (Homo Deus, 2017), Harari (History/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) proves that he has not lost his touch, casting a brilliantly insightful eye on today’s myriad crises, from Trump to terrorism, Brexit to big data. As the author emphasizes, “humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group, and nation has its own tales and myths.” Three grand stories once predicted the future. World War II eliminated the fascist story but stimulated communism for a few decades until its collapse. The liberal story—think democracy, free markets, and globalism—reigned supreme for a decade until the 20th-century nasties—dictators, populists, and nationalists—came back in style. They promote jingoism over international cooperation, vilify the opposition, demonize immigrants and rival nations, and then win elections. “A bit like the Soviet elites in the 1980s,” writes Harari, “liberals don’t understand how history deviates from its preordained course, and they lack an alternative prism through which to interpret reality.” The author certainly understands, and in 21 painfully astute essays, he delivers his take on where our increasingly “post-truth” world is headed. Human ingenuity, which enables us to control the outside world, may soon re-engineer our insides, extend life, and guide our thoughts. Science-fiction movies get the future wrong, if only because they have happy endings. Most readers will find Harari’s narrative deliciously reasonable, including his explanation of the stories (not actually true but rational) of those who elect dictators, populists, and nationalists. His remedies for wildly disruptive technology (biotech, infotech) and its consequences (climate change, mass unemployment) ring true, provided nations act with more good sense than they have shown throughout history.
Harari delivers yet another tour de force.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-51217-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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