Fans of Graham Greene and Alan Furst will revel in this well-told true-life story.
An unlikely tale of true espionage by London-based journalist/historian Hemming (Abdulnasser Gharem: Art of Survival, 2012, etc.) in which a nerdy Jewish kid becomes a kind of James Bond.
Geoffrey Pyke (1893-1948) found his calling in the face of Nazi Germany’s official anti-Semitism. He did not forget that as a British POW in Germany in World War I, though, he had been confined to a barracks reserved for Jews—and not by Germans but by his fellow British officers, masters of “the casual anti-Semitism of Edwardian England.” Still, he remained a loyal servant of the empire, gathering valuable intelligence that would have earned him a firing squad as a spy. Convinced that the educational orthodoxy was misguided, Pyke also attempted to start a network of schools to be funded by his wizardry in the stock market. Convinced that it was not enough to defeat the Nazis but to “make fools of them in beating them,” he gained the confidence of Winston Churchill and cooked up some elaborately improbable technologies, including “an unsinkable aircraft carrier made out of a cheap new material that could be produced quickly.” Along the way, Pyke fell into the communist orbit. “I am primarily an anti-fascist,” he insisted, but he would have been a candidate for execution by his own country had he not beaten his pursuers to the punch. Hemming examines the facts, augmented by “the release of previously classified documents by MI5,” surrounding the Pyke affair, suggesting that while his subject, a tinkerer and discoverer, journalist, and genius indeed, had given material aid to the Soviets, he may not have been so deeply involved as was supposed. Pyke has been dead for nearly 70 years, so modest rehabilitation is of less interest than the fascinating story surrounding his deeds—for, as Time noted, killing himself “was the only unoriginal thing he had ever done.”
Fans of Graham Greene and Alan Furst will revel in this well-told true-life story.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-577-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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