A dry, dreary waste of a grand subject, well below the author’s usual standard.
The life and career of a tough, profane, cool-headed secret agent who worked for British and American intelligence in both hot and cold wars.
Mitchell’s (The Freedom Summer Murders, 2014, etc.) tedious tally of quick encounters, obscure locales, and vaguely described tasks sucks the juice out of what is plainly a rip-roaring tale. Not the least deterred by blowing off her own foot in a hunting accident (she dubbed her prosthetic limb “Cuthbert”), Maryland-born Hall played such an important role building networks of informants in Vichy France (“I’ve made some tart friends,” she reported, who “know a hell of a lot!”), supplying arms and advice to insurgents, and helping prisoners escape that she was both made a member of the Order of the British Empire and awarded a Distinguished Service Cross by the U.S.—the latter being the only one given to a civilian woman in World War II. Here, though the author does direct nods to many of her intrepid associates, he buries her own exploits in generalities and extraneous minor details plus, for her later years in the CIA, eye-blearing boilerplate from internal personnel reviews. The backmatter offers plenty of documentation, but the small period photos throughout are too often only tangentially relevant to the narrative.
A dry, dreary waste of a grand subject, well below the author’s usual standard. (bibliography, endnotes, index, maps) (Biography. 12-15)Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-545-93612-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Fans of all things martial will echo his “HOOYAH!”—but the troubled aftermath comes in for some attention too.
Abridged but not toned down, this young-readers version of an ex-SEAL sniper’s account (SEAL Team Six, 2011) of his training and combat experiences in Operation Desert Storm and the first Battle of Mogadishu makes colorful, often compelling reading.
“My experiences weren’t always enjoyable,” Wasdin writes, “but they were always adrenaline-filled!” Not to mention testosterone-fueled. He goes on to ascribe much of his innate toughness to being regularly beaten by his stepfather as a child and punctuates his passage through the notoriously hellacious SEAL training with frequent references to other trainees who fail or drop out. He tears into the Clinton administration (whose “support for our troops had sagged like a sack of turds”), indecisive commanders and corrupt Italian “allies” for making such a hash of the entire Somalian mission. In later chapters he retraces his long, difficult physical and emotional recovery from serious wounds received during the “Black Hawk Down” operation, his increasing focus on faith and family after divorce and remarriage and his second career as a chiropractor.
Fans of all things martial will echo his “HOOYAH!”—but the troubled aftermath comes in for some attention too. (acronym/ordinance glossary, adult level reading list) (Memoir. 12-14)Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-01643-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In either iteration, a provocative counter to conventional, blinkered views of our national story.
A classic framing of this country’s history from a multicultural perspective, clumsily cut and recast into more simplified language for young readers.
Veering away from the standard “Master Narrative” to tell “the story of a nation peopled by the world,” the violence- and injustice-laden account focuses on minorities, from African- Americans (“the central minority throughout our country’s history”), Mexicans and Native Americans to Japanese, Vietnamese, Sikh, Russian Jewish and Muslim immigrants. Stefoff reduces Takaki’s scholarly but fluid narrative (1993, revised 2008) to choppy sentences and sound-bite quotes. She also adds debatable generalizations, such as a sweeping claim that Native Americans “lived outside of white society’s borders,” and an incorrect one that the Emancipation Proclamation “freed the slaves.” Readers may take a stronger interest in their own cultural heritage from this broad picture of the United States as, historically, a tapestry of ethnic identities that are “separate but also shared”—but being more readable and, by page count at least, only about a third longer, the original version won’t be out of reach of much of the intended audience, despite its denser prose.
In either iteration, a provocative counter to conventional, blinkered views of our national story. (endnotes, glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60980-416-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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