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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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