Category: Books (Page 10 of 11)

Master storyteller Ben Macintyre’s most ambitious work to date brings to life the twentieth century’s greatest spy story.

Harold ‘Kim’ Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain ’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.

But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow —and not just Elliott’s words, for in America , Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton’s and Elliott’s unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him—until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.

Told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, “A Spy Among Friends” is Ben Macintyre’s best book yet, a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.

The Book Discussion will be held on January 14 at 12:30 p.m. in the Darien Library on the 2nd Floor in the Harris Room.

Copies are available at the Darien Library.

Tom Reifenheiser will lead this book club discussion of “Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century” by Christian Carrel

Review by Isaac Chotiner a senior editor at The New Republic:

If Christian Caryl had set out to write a book about 1968, showing how the many convulsions and uprisings of that astonishing year were connected, his task would have been an easy one. It might be difficult to prove cause and effect between, say, the May events in Paris and the chaos at the Democratic convention in August, but as people might have said at the time, something was in the air. It wasn’t mere coincidence that led to youth revolts all over the world. In the case of 1989, such connections are even more obvious.

Caryl, a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and a former Newsweek correspondent, is faced with a much harder task in “Strange Rebels,” his engrossing new book of five case studies from 1979. This was the year Deng Xiaoping initiated the reforms that would spur the Chinese economy; the year an anxious Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan after its Communist allies faced resistance from local “freedom fighters”; the year Pope John Paul II made his momentous trip to Poland; the year Margaret Thatcher overturned an etiolated Labour government; and the year Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the shah, Our Man in Tehran.

As Caryl writes, in an effort to link stories that don’t, at first glance, hold together: “It was in 1979 that the twin forces of markets and religion, discounted for so long, came back with a vengeance.” Indeed, the power of both markets and religion registered in places beyond those covered in his main narrative. On the religious front, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani military dictator who did so much to aid Afghanistan’s rebels, ordered his predecessor to be hanged and sped forward the Islamicization of his country. And as Caryl briefly mentions, the Moral Majority was formed in 1979. The following year saw the election of Thatcher’s ally Ronald Reagan and — compared with what preceded them — the relatively free-­market policies in Indira Gandhi’s India.

The problem for Caryl is that concepts like “religion” and “markets” are much too broad. John Paul II may have helped undermine the Communist regime in Poland, and the young religious Muslims of Afghanistan may have forced complacent observers to realize that faith wasn’t going to disappear from the world. (The upheaval in Iran, where a theocracy replaced an autocrat, makes this point even more forcefully.) But it’s difficult to draw comparisons between the forces motivating the Polish pope’s admiring countrymen and Iran’s student revolutionaries.

As for markets, it’s true that Thatcher preached their virtues, and that Deng took advantage of China’s awesome economic capacities. “The forces unleashed in 1979 marked the beginning of the end of the great socialist utopias that had dominated so much of the 20th century,” Caryl writes. But what does he mean by “socialist utopias”? Presumably he’s being ironic, but either way, it makes little sense to compare postwar Labour governments (which were certainly subject to diminishing returns but which also gave birth to a highly successful welfare state) to the pathological murderousness of Mao’s China. Caryl notes that Thatcher’s “belief in individual responsibility and the primacy of personal freedom had its roots in a spiritual stance rather than an economic theory” — an attempt to link the free-market “fundamentalism” of the prime minster with the religiosity on display in some of the book’s other sections. But the men Caryl terms the “religious thinkers” of the Iranian Revolution would hardly be conceptual allies of Margaret Thatcher.

“Strange Rebels” is a well-written and thorough work of history whose elements don’t really cohere. About one thing, however, Caryl is certainly right: “The political experiments of 1979 continue to define our world.” It has become something of a cliché to remark on the consequences of these various events, especially — post‑9/11 — the decision of the Soviet Union to invade the future haven of Osama bin Laden. But sometimes clichés exist for an appropriate reason. Noting that things didn’t have to play out the way they did and recognizing that contingencies are a large part of history, Caryl concedes that “to study 1979 is also to study the tyranny of chance.” The clearest conclusion of this book is that 1979 happened, by chance, to be a monumental year.

[From Amazon.com]

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

[From Amazon.com]

The acclaimed author of The Sweet Hereafter and Rule of the Bone returns with Lost Memory of Skin, a provocative new novel that illuminates the shadowed edges of contemporary American culture with startling and unforgettable results

Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the center of Russell Banks’s uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known in his new identity only as the Kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders.

Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to comprehend. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and recidivism among convicted sex offenders. The two men forge a tentative partnership, the Kid remaining wary of the Professor’s motives even as he accepts the counsel and financial assistance of the older man.

When the camp beneath the causeway is raided by the police, and later, when a hurricane all but destroys the settlement, the Professor tries to help the Kid in practical matters while trying to teach his young charge new ways of looking at, and understanding, what he has done. But when the Professor’s past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men’s relationship shifts.

Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.

Long one of our most acute and insightful novelists, Russell Banks often examines the indistinct boundaries between our intentions and actions. A mature and masterful work of contemporary fiction from one of our most accomplished storytellers, Lost Memory of Skin unfolds in language both powerful and beautifully lyrical, show-casing Banks at his most compelling, his reckless sense of humor and intense empathy at full bore.

The perfect convergence of writer and subject, Lost Memory of Skin probes the zeitgeist of a troubled society where zero tolerance has erased any hope of subtlety and compassion—a society where isolating the offender has perhaps created a new kind of victim.

From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour, comes City of Thieves, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival — and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.

During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet colonel to use in his daughter’s wedding cake. In a city cut off from all supplies and suffering unbelievable deprivation, Lev and Kolya embark on a hunt through the dire lawlessness of Leningrad and behind enemy lines to find the impossible.

By turns insightful and funny, thrilling and terrifying, City of Thieves is a gripping, cinematic World War II adventure and an intimate coming-of-age story with an utterly contemporary feel for how boys become men.

At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation’s burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 people. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal.
Graced by David McCullough’s remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in nineteenth-century America, of overweening confidence, of energy, and of tragedy. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are necessarily behaving responsibly.

[From The New Yorker]

Our current read is Citizens of London , In this book, Lynne Olson has written a work of World War II history even more relevant and revealing than her acclaimed Troublesome Young Men. Here is the behind-the-scenes story of how the United States forged its wartime alliance with Britain, told from the perspective of three key American players in London: Edward R. Murrow, Averell Harriman, and John Gilbert Winant. Drawing from a variety of primary sources, Olson skillfully depicts the dramatic personal journeys of these men who, determined to save Britain from Hitler, helped convince a cautious Franklin Roosevelt and a reluctant American public to support the British at a critical time.

The three — Murrow, the handsome, chain-smoking head of CBS News in Europe; Harriman, the hard-driving millionaire who ran FDR’s Lend-Lease program in London; and Winant, the shy, idealistic U.S. ambassador to Britain—formed close ties with Winston Churchill and were drawn into Churchill’s official and personal circles. So intense were their relationships with the Churchills that they all became romantically involved with members of the prime minister’s family: Harriman and Murrow with Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela, and Winant with Churchill’s favorite daughter, Sarah.

Others were honorary “Citizens of London” as well, including the gregarious, fiercely ambitious Dwight D. Eisenhower, an obscure general who, as the first commander of American forces in Britain, was determined to do everything in his power to make the alliance a success, and Tommy Hitchcock, a world-famous polo player and World War I fighter pilot who helped save the Allies’ bombing campaign against Germany.

Citizens of London, however, is more than just the story of these Americans and the world leaders they aided and influenced. It’s an engrossing account of the transformative power of personal diplomacy and, above all, a rich, panoramic tale of two cities: Washington, D.C., a lazy Southern town slowly growing into a hub of international power, and London, a class-conscious capital transformed by the Blitz into a model of stoic grace under violent pressure and deprivation. Deeply human, brilliantly researched, and beautifully written, Citizens of London is a new triumph from an author swiftly becoming one of the finest in her field.

Our current read is Mission to Paris. 

It is the late summer of 1938, Europe is about to explode, the Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie for Paramount France. The Nazis know he’s coming—a secret bureau within the Reich Foreign Ministry has for years been waging political warfare against France, using bribery, intimidation, and corrupt newspapers to weaken French morale and degrade France’s will to defend herself.

For their purposes, Fredric Stahl is a perfect agent of influence, and they attack him. What they don’t know is that Stahl, horrified by the Nazi war on Jews and intellectuals, has become part of an informal spy service being run out of the American embassy in Paris.

From Alan Furst, the bestselling author, often praised as the best spy novelist ever, comes a novel that’s truly hard to put down. Mission to Paris includes beautifully drawn scenes of romance and intimacy, and the novel is alive with extraordinary characters: the German Baroness von Reschke, a famous hostess deeply involved in Nazi clandestine operations; the assassins Herbert and Lothar; the Russian film actress and spy Olga Orlova; the Hungarian diplomat and spy, Count Janos Polanyi; along with the French cast of Stahl’s movie, German film producers, and the magnetic women in Stahl’s life, the socialite Kiki de Saint-Ange and the émigré Renate Steiner.

But always at the center of the novel is the city of Paris, the heart and soul of Europe—its alleys and bistros, hotels grand and anonymous, and the Parisians, living every night as though it was their last. As always, Alan Furst brings to life both a dark time in history and the passion of the human hearts that fought to survive it.