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Anne Bartlett

NonfictionBiography

Al Capone and his enduring fame

Review by Anne Bartlett

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the glory days of Al Capone—Scarface, Big Al, Public Enemy Number One—is how short they were: six years, from mid-level thug to big boss to jail. So why is he still the iconic American gangster, nearly 70 years after his death from the complications of syphilis? 

Well, he loved publicity. But because his legend was a creation of newshounds and Hollywood, much of what we think we know is wrong. Biographer Deirdre Bair tries to uncover the man behind the flamboyant image in Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend. It seems a surprising project for an author who has written about Samuel Beckett and Carl Jung. Bair fell into it by happenstance when she met a man who was trying to find out if he was related to Capone. Eventually, she was able to talk extensively with Capone descendants.

They mostly turn out to be private, law-abiding folks whose reminiscences are engrossing and sometimes touching. Capone’s Irish-American wife, Mae, is at the heart of their memories—a woman who was, in their eyes, decent, loyal and loving. Syphilis, likely contracted from a prostitute, destroyed Capone’s mind, but Mae never gave up on him.

Bair carefully tries to sort out truth from baloney. No one knows how many people Capone and his minions killed. But Bair can say with confidence that the federal income tax evasion case that sent him to prison would have fallen apart if he hadn’t had incompetent lawyers and a biased judge.

Bair is particularly good at putting the Capones in the context of the Italian immigrant culture that shaped them. Capone himself wouldn’t have liked that; he always stressed that he was American-born, not an Italian. But he would have gotten a huge kick out of his enduring fame.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the glory days of Al Capone—Scarface, Big Al, Public Enemy Number One—is how short they were: six years, from mid-level thug to big boss to jail. So why is he still the iconic American gangster, nearly 70 years after his death from the complications of syphilis?
NonfictionTrue Crime

Inside the investigation of Yogurt Shop Murders

Review by Anne Bartlett

As he looked back on the Yogurt Shop Murders, one former Austin, Texas, detective wanted to emphasize a hard fact: “Confession is a beginning,” he said. “We had 50.”

You read that right—maybe not exactly 50, but there were certainly dozens of confessions to the horrific 1991 killing of four teen girls, who were found naked, bound and shot to death in the yogurt shop where two of them worked. Police know that any big case attracts false confessions from the mentally unstable. They also know that overzealous officers sometimes convince suspects—often very young, ill-educated, suggestible ones—to make false confessions. 

Was this such a case? Beverly Lowry’s gripping re-examination, Who Killed These Girls?, can’t be definitive, but her descriptions of the 1999 “confessions” of two hapless young men raise serious doubts about their statements. Nevertheless, they and two supposed accomplices were arrested. Two were convicted; the other two set free. There was no physical evidence against any of them. After 10 years, the two convicts were freed on appeal, and the D.A. reluctantly admitted that new DNA evidence didn’t implicate any of the four.

Lowry begins the book with moving depictions of the victims, and their still-suffering families are strong presences throughout. But the heart of her narrative is the perhaps-coerced confessions of Mike Scott and Rob Springsteen. Their defenders say they knew nothing about the crime until the police fed them information—and tricked and browbeat them into “admissions.” Lowry’s book is as much about the tactics and culture of American law enforcement as it is about this specific crime. 

The Austin police still insist that the four men were guilty. But Lowry makes an impressive case that thanks to the department’s missteps, we really have no idea who killed those innocent girls.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As he looked back on the Yogurt Shop Murders, one former Austin, Texas, detective wanted to emphasize a hard fact: “Confession is a beginning,” he said. “We had 50.”
NonfictionBiography

A forgotten pioneer in the world of news

Review by Anne Bartlett

Before anyone had ever heard of Katharine Graham, there was Alicia Patterson. She built a major newspaper out of a small-town gazette, hobnobbed with presidents, wrote about hotspots around the globe and was a close adviser to Adlai Stevenson, the dominant liberal politician of the 1950s. She was also his lover, despite the fact that both were married.

Patterson, the founding publisher of Newsday, died too young in 1963, at the age of 56, and she’s little remembered today. The Huntress, a biography by her fond but clear-eyed niece Alice Arlen, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, and her husband, Michael J. Arlen, a longtime New Yorker writer, revives her story.

Patterson was to-the-manor born near Chicago, with serious wealth on both sides of the family. Her father, Joe Patterson, was a scion of the colorful Medill publishing clan that ran the Chicago Tribune. Joe himself founded the New York Daily News. But his daughter did have much to overcome—she was regarded as a family disappointment, unwilling to settle down in placid upper-class matrimony. 

Patterson was a top horsewoman, pioneering aviator and big-game hunter, but she later dismissed those avocations as “pointless.” Luckily for her, her third marriage, to rich, influential Harry Guggenheim, took. Although they constantly clashed, he bankrolled Newsday.

Then came Stevenson, unhappily married, intellectual, ambitious, endlessly dithering about his future. He and Patterson were lovers on and off for years, and she helped push him to two presidential runs. He lost, but he was the era’s liberal icon. 

The Arlens have a breezy, witty writing style that would have pleased Patterson, an intrepid woman who finally found her true calling in journalism. Alice Arlen died earlier this year at 75; she left a buoyant tribute to the aunt who encouraged her own aspirations.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Before anyone had ever heard of Katharine Graham, there was Alicia Patterson. She built a major newspaper out of a small-town gazette, hobnobbed with presidents, wrote about hotspots around the globe and was a close adviser to Adlai Stevenson, the dominant liberal politician of the 1950s. She was also his lover, despite the fact that both were married.
NonfictionNature

The delicate business of dealing with bears

Review by Anne Bartlett

Exhausted from work and suffering chronic pain from an injury, Alabama farm boy Harry Walker desperately needed a break. It was 1972, so he and a friend took off to look for America. They landed eventually in Yellowstone National Park, where Harry had a blast with a new girl. Then, Harry was killed by a bear.

It’s a horribly sad story. Sure, Harry did some things wrong, and the National Park Service did its best to blame him for his own death. But the context was more complicated than that, as the NPS knew and as writer Jordan Fisher Smith carefully shows in the absorbing Engineering Eden. For Smith, a ranger for 21 years, Harry’s death by grizzly bear was the tragic result of NPS myopia.

Using the lawsuit brought by Harry’s family as a focal point, Smith introduces us to the debate that consumed the national parks in the late 20th century: How should we save these treasures from depredation? Should we step back and act merely as “guardians,” letting nature re-establish its own equilibrium? Or should we be active “gardeners,” intervening to manage the parks’ ecology?

Following decades of allowing park visitors to feed bears, either directly or indirectly at dumps, the service by 1972 had embarked on a “guardian” experiment by abruptly shutting down the dumps, with no effort to help the bears make the transition. The outcome: a surge of attacks on camps by hungry bears.

Opposing the “guardian” approach was a cadre of wildlife scientists led by the colorful Craighead brothers, pioneers of bear tagging research. Through the conflicts of the Craigheads, zoologist Starker Leopold, Yellowstone scientist Glen Cole and other nature experts, Smith shows that Harry was both the victim of a well-intentioned but misguided strategy and a catalyst for a major course change. Smith believes that change has been for the better—and that Harry’s short life had true purpose.

Exhausted from work and suffering chronic pain from an injury, Alabama farm boy Harry Walker desperately needed a break. It was 1972, so he and a friend took off to look for America. They landed eventually in Yellowstone National Park, where Harry had a blast with a new girl. Then, Harry was killed by a bear.
NonfictionMemoir

A real-life Atticus Finch

Review by Anne Bartlett

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, July 2016

Like almost everyone else in the U.S., Atlanta attorney Joseph Madison Beck had read To Kill a Mockingbird, and he decided in 1992 to satisfy his curiosity about the similarity between the novel and an episode in his own family history. He wrote to author Harper Lee: Did she know about his white father’s legal defense of an African-American man accused of raping a white woman in 1938, not far from where Lee was then growing up in south Alabama? No, Lee wrote back politely; though she could see there were “obvious parallels,” she didn’t recall the case at all.

The case in Troy, Alabama, was locally notorious at the time, but whether or not it had any unconscious influence on Lee, the story outlined in Beck’s family memoir, My Father and Atticus Finch, is absolutely worth knowing as an illuminating instance of the staggering racism of the Jim Crow South and of the complications of its social order. 

Joseph Beck’s father, Foster Beck, a young rural lawyer, was strong-armed into defending the accused rapist by a judge who was embarrassed by how bad the Alabama legal system had looked in the recent “Scottsboro Boys” case. At first reluctant to take the case, Beck became convinced that the defendant Charles White was innocent, and he fought for him to the tragic end. 

His strong legal argument ran into a wall of white intransigence. In Lee’s novel, the courageous Atticus ultimately goes on with his respectable life; Foster Beck was not so lucky. He paid for the rest of his days for the “crime” of defending a black man too vigorously.

His son has delved into court records to narrate the trial, but also beautifully describes the region’s community rituals—hunting doves, killing hogs, making cane syrup. More importantly, he lovingly portrays his parents and grandparents in all their complexities. Foster Beck and his wife-to-be Bertha Stewart were honorable people who were punished for fighting injustice, and this book is a fine tribute.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Like almost everyone else in the U.S., Atlanta attorney Joseph Madison Beck had read To Kill a Mockingbird, and he decided in 1992 to satisfy his curiosity about the similarity between the novel and an episode in his own family history. He wrote to author Harper Lee: Did she know about his white father’s legal defense of an African-American man accused of raping a white woman in 1938, not far from where Lee was then growing up in south Alabama? No, Lee wrote back politely; though she could see there were “obvious parallels,” she didn’t recall the case at all.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

From victor to turncoat

Review by Anne Bartlett

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, May 2016

The state of play in the American Revolution, late 1777: One famous general has lost every significant battle he’s been in, often because he couldn’t curb his aggressive instincts. Another famous general has won several major victories, including one that will prove to be the most pivotal of the war.

The initially unsuccessful general was George Washington; the winner was Benedict Arnold. We know how it turned out—in the coming years, Washington became First in the Hearts of His Countrymen and Arnold became First Traitor. But how on earth did it happen? Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the bestsellers In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower, tackles this fascinating reversal of fortune in Valiant Ambition, an engrossing narrative of the war’s most difficult years.

In Philbrick’s view, both men were indeed valiant and ambitious, but their fundamental characters were diametrically opposed. Washington had a true moral compass, a long horizon and the capacity to learn from his mistakes. Arnold was impetuous, greedy and consumed with self-regard. When Congress mistreated Arnold, he became enraged, started smuggling contraband and ultimately sold out to the British. 

The British unwittingly helped both men to their fates. The dysfunction of the infant American government was nothing compared to the internecine warfare of the British generals, who spent much of their energy scheming against each other. General William Howe beat Washington in every pitched battle they fought, but his hatred for his compatriot General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne exceeded his desire to win what he probably considered a pointless colonial dust-up. Perhaps Philbrick’s least favorite character is the British spy Major John André, the ruthless charmer whose careless misstep led to Arnold’s downfall and Andre’s own execution.

Philbrick argues that the quarrelsome, divided Americans needed Arnold’s perfidy as much as they did Washington’s greatness to unify their new nation. He pushes aside the patriotic myth to unveil the war’s messy reality—and it’s still a rousing adventure.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The state of play in the American Revolution, late 1777: One famous general has lost every significant battle he’s been in, often because he couldn’t curb his aggressive instincts. Another famous general has won several major victories, including one that will prove to be the most pivotal of the war.
NonfictionHistory

Remembering George Washington

Review by Anne Bartlett

Of all the weird twists in the 40-year drama of building the Washington Monument, perhaps the oddest was in 1855, when a band of rebels staged a coup and seized the project, largely because the board overseeing the construction had accepted a commemorative stone from Pope Pius IX. The Know-Nothing Party faction didn’t give back the monument until 1858.

Of course, the “monument” was then a 153-foot stump, decades from completion. As John Steele Gordon shows in his enjoyable Washington’s Monument, a history of the memorial specifically and obelisks more generally, dysfunction is not a modern phenomenon. Officials dithered over a suitable honor for George Washington from 1783, when Congress first passed a resolution, to 1888, when the obelisk-shaped tower, by then its full 555 feet, officially opened. The pattern: initial community enthusiasm, declining interest, failed fundraising, government bailout.

Gordon calls it “obelisk-shaped” because a real obelisk is by definition a monolith, carved from a single piece of stone. Obelisks were first erected—probably—by the ancient Egyptians, to stand in pairs outside temple entrances. There are still plenty of them around, and Gordon interweaves their stories with that of our monument.  

The heroes of Gordon’s book are the engineers who figured out how to move the ancient obelisks and build the Washington Monument. Each project presented a huge logistical challenge, overcome by technical innovation. These were astounding feats, forever capturing the public imagination: Some 600,000 people visit the Washington Monument annually.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Of all the weird twists in the 40-year drama of building the Washington Monument, perhaps the oddest was in 1855, when a band of rebels staged a coup and seized the project, largely because the board overseeing the construction had accepted a commemorative stone from Pope Pius IX. The Know-Nothing Party faction didn’t give back the monument until 1858.
NonfictionMemoir

Looking back on a childhood in a fundamentalist colony

Review by Anne Bartlett

Like so many teenage girls, Ruth Wariner and her friends used to spend hours back in the 1980s dreaming and talking of future romances. But despite living in a fundamentalist “plural marriage” colony in Mexico that had broken away from the Mormon church, most of them did not hope for a polygamous future as a “sister wife.” They knew all too well what that meant.

Wariner was her father’s 39th child; her mother, 17 when she married, was the fifth wife of “the prophet.” When Wariner was a baby, her father was killed by assassins sent by his brother in a bloody feud over control of the colony. Her stepfather had four wives, none of whom he could afford to support, and Wariner’s upbringing was horrific. In The Sound of Gravel, Wariner describes her childhood and eventual escape in vivid, heartrending detail.

Her mother, Kathy, loving but in thrall to her ghastly second husband, Lane, had 10 children, three with disabilities. They lived in cramped, primitive conditions in their Mexican settlement, largely supported by the welfare fraud Kathy committed on frequent trips back to the U.S. Lane was abusive and incompetent, ultimately with tragic consequences. 

Wariner loved her siblings and friends, but suffered from mistreatment, poverty and a truncated education as her family hid in plain sight from the puzzled but apparently clueless authorities. All her frantic efforts to end her step-father’s abuse were stymied by her mother and their church. 

Wariner takes us inside this renegade community as only a survivor could. She writes with particular beauty about her brothers and sisters, innocent children living sad, deprived lives because of their parents’ folly. Her fears for them finally drove 15-year-old Wariner to flee to the U.S., where she built a better life for the family with the intelligence, fortitude and compassion that are evident throughout her impressive memoir.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Like so many teenage girls, Ruth Wariner and her friends used to spend hours back in the 1980s dreaming and talking of future romances. But despite living in a fundamentalist “plural marriage” colony in Mexico that had broken away from the Mormon church, most of them did not hope for a polygamous future as a “sister wife.” They knew all too well what that meant.
NonfictionBiography

A writer’s regret

Review by Anne Bartlett

As the popularity of the movie Midnight in Paris demonstrated, tales of the 1920s Lost Generation—Scott, Zelda and the gang—have an enduring appeal. That “lost generation” nickname was first used by Ernest Hemingway, and his early novels and posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast, are among its best depictions.

A.E. Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love is a poignant postscript to A Moveable Feast, particularly to Hemingway’s bittersweet last chapter. Hotchner, now 95, was Hemingway’s younger friend and Boswell, notebook at the ready, accompanying Papa to all the iconic haunts: Venice, Paris, Pamplona, Key West. He wrote a full biography of his mentor soon after Hemingway’s suicide. In this late memoir, Hotchner wants finally to give Hemingway his say about his one true love: Hadley, his first wife, the Paris wife.

This book is Hotchner’s riposte to critics who believe the first edition of A Moveable Feast was overedited by Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary, in a way that was unfair to wife no. 2, Pauline. Quite the contrary, Hotchner says. In private conversation, Hemingway said that leaving Hadley for Pauline was the worst decision of his life, and had turned him in the wrong direction, as an artist and a man.

The outlines of the story are familiar, but Hotchner provides new detail, including the wrenching “100 days” that Hadley insisted on as a trial separation. During that miserable time, Hemingway lost many of his Paris friends, who to his apparent surprise hadn’t liked being turned into fictional characters. 

This is a book of elegiac charm, about a great writer’s regrets. It’s framed at beginning and end by Hotchner’s heartbreaking visit to his close friend in a psychiatric hospital, not long before he shot himself. Hotchner likes to think he’s now with Hadley.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A.E. Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love is a poignant postscript to A Moveable Feast, particularly to Hemingway’s bittersweet last chapter. Hotchner, now 95, was Hemingway’s younger friend and Boswell, notebook at the ready, accompanying Papa to all the iconic haunts: Venice, Paris, Pamplona, Key West. He wrote a full biography of his mentor soon after Hemingway’s suicide. In this late memoir, Hotchner wants finally to give Hemingway his say about his one true love: Hadley, his first wife, the Paris wife.
NonfictionHistory

Unearthing the buried secrets of an eccentric aristrocrat

Review by Anne Bartlett

The stupendously wealthy 5th Duke of Portland had a very weird obsession: building underground. At his order, tunnels, a ballroom, a church and a vast network of chambers were constructed underneath his estate at Welbeck Abbey in England. It might also be said he lived an underground life, avoiding human contact whenever possible. He communicated with his servants by written message and traveled mostly at night, with a lantern attached to his belt.

So when a middle-aged widow named Anna Maria Druce claimed in court in 1898 that her late father-in-law T.C. Druce, a successful London retail merchant, had, in fact, been the late 5th Duke in disguise, it seemed improbable, but perhaps not impossible. So began one of the stranger legal cases in British history. It was a public sensation for the next decade.

Author Piu Marie Eatwell brings this bizarre story to a modern audience in The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse, and it’s as entertaining now as ever. In vivid, cinematic scenes, she lays out the battles between Anna Maria and her allies against the 6th Duke and her own Druce relatives, who thought she was nuts. The case got even more outlandish as secrets emerged about T.C. Druce that brought a whole new cast of colorful Australian relatives into the picture. To top it off, the legendary Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard played a pivotal role in the inquiry.

Wonderful as that all is, the best part of the book is the last third, where Eatwell describes her own investigation. The outcome of the Druce case in 1907 is a matter of record, but there was much those Edwardian lawyers either didn’t know or didn’t reveal. Eatwell finds letters, documents and pictures that provide a completely different perspective on the odd 5th Duke—and expose anew the extraordinary hypocrisy of which some 19th century patriarchs were capable. 

The stupendously wealthy 5th Duke of Portland had a very weird obsession: building underground. At his order, tunnels, a ballroom, a church and a vast network of chambers were constructed underneath his estate at Welbeck Abbey in England. It might also be said he lived an underground life, avoiding human contact whenever possible. He communicated with his servants by written message and traveled mostly at night, with a lantern attached to his belt.

NonfictionHistory

An anguished search for truth

Review by Anne Bartlett

Like so many Americans, writer Rita Gabis has mixed ancestry. Her late father was Jewish and her mother is a Lithuanian Catholic, whose family emigrated to the U.S. after World War II. Gabis knew her maternal grandfather—“Senelis” in Lithuanian—as a fond elderly man who bought her treats and took her fishing. But she had one disturbing memory: the time he told her, “No be like your father . . . Jews no good.”

It wasn’t until Senelis was long dead that her mother mentioned that he had worked for the Germans during the war—that is, the Nazis occupying Lithuania. He was a police chief. In other words, there was a good chance her dear grandpa had persecuted Jews.

A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet is Gabis’ gripping, psychologically acute account of her search for the truth about him, a wrenching personal journey. Was Pranas Puronis a Lithuanian patriot who helped the Nazis’ victims? Or was he one of the killers? Trapped or complicit? Gabis talks with relatives and Holocaust survivors, digs through records, travels to Lithuania and environs. Most moving are her interviews with elderly Jews who escaped the bloodlands where their families and friends died—remarkable people of brains, courage and wisdom.

Their country had been a stew of competing ethnicities. Many Lithuanians hated the Soviet Russians who were the first occupiers and welcomed the Germans as liberators. While some Lithuanians helped Jews, it is clear that others massacred thousands of Jews and Poles, under the direction of Germans. It was less clear to Gabis for a long time what role her grandfather played in that horror. Everyone seemed to have a different story.

Ultimately, an obscure Polish court file provides answers. But it’s Gabis’ resolute hunt and expressive prose that really illuminate these years of anguish.

Like so many Americans, writer Rita Gabis has mixed ancestry. Her late father was Jewish and her mother is a Lithuanian Catholic, whose family emigrated to the U.S. after World War II. Gabis knew her maternal grandfather—“Senelis” in Lithuanian—as a fond elderly man who bought her treats and took her fishing. But she had one disturbing memory: the time he told her, “No be like your father . . . Jews no good.”
NonfictionHistory

Soviet history worthy of a soap opera

Review by Anne Bartlett

Hard as it might be to imagine, readers of Ben Mezrich’s Once Upon a Time in Russia could find themselves feeling a certain sympathy for Vladimir Putin. Sure, the new Russian president was trying to seize control of the news media in 2000 when he forced television magnate Boris Berezovsky to sell his business. But Berezovsky was, to put it mildly, a handful. 

In the gunslinger-capitalism years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, he had risen from mathematician to software guy to billionaire TV tycoon by running down everyone in his path. He and his oligarch buddies essentially bought the 1996 presidential election for Boris Yeltsin, and he was instrumental in the choice of Putin as Yeltsin’s successor. But he badly underestimated Putin and ended up in bitter exile.

Mezrich, best-selling author of The Accidental Billionaires, which depicted the rise of Facebook, is now writing about a world far more dangerous than Silicon Valley. He explores the evolution of post-Soviet Russia through the improbable stories of Berezovsky and his cohorts, primarily protégé-turned-rival Roman Abramovich (engineering school dropout to aluminium titan) and Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB man who died in a bizarre polonium poisoning in 2006.

Using what he calls “re-created dialogue” based on interviews and court documents, Mezrich unfolds the drama in cinematic vignettes. Among them: Berezovsky survives a car bombing; Putin lays down the law to the oligarchs in Stalin’s old dacha; Abramovich lands by helicopter at an Alpine resort and agrees to pay $1.3 billion to Berezovsky to dissolve their partnership; Berezovsky chases Abramovich into a Hermès store in London to serve him a subpoena as he sues him for $5.6 billion. Surreal as it seems, it was all quite real.

It’s Wolf Hall on the Moskva: Litvinenko was murdered. Berezovsky died a broken man. Abramovich is worth an estimated $9 billion and owns England’s Chelsea Football Club. And Putin still runs Russia.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Hard as it might be to imagine, readers of Ben Mezrich’s Once Upon a Time in Russia could find themselves feeling a certain sympathy for Vladimir Putin. Sure, the new Russian president was trying to seize control of the news media in 2000 when he forced television magnate Boris Berezovsky to sell his business. But Berezovsky was, to put it mildly, a handful.
NonfictionTrue Crime

The family who spies together

Review by Anne Bartlett

In his early Cold War novels, John le Carré referred to something called “Moscow Rules”: the tradecraft used by spies in a hostile city when they had to be super-cautious to avoid getting caught. If you want to learn the 21st-century equivalent of those rules, The Spy’s Son is a great place to start—although in real life, they don’t always work as smoothly as in fiction.

Author Bryan Denson, an experienced journalist, leads us step by step through an extraordinary espionage case that stretched, in two phases, from the mid-1990s to 2011. In phase one, Jim Nicholson, a rising star in the CIA, sold his agency’s secrets to the Russians to get himself out of a financial jam. He was caught and sent to prison. Then, in a remarkable twist in 2006, Jim, still imprisoned, recruited his son Nathan to sell more secrets to the Russians.

Nathan was a somewhat adrift young man in his 20s who loved his father too much to fathom how he was being manipulated into treachery. With words of paternal care and religious faith, Jim lured his son into his scheme. The Russians were happy to play along; luckily for U.S. national security, the FBI caught on to Nathan as fast as it had to his father.

The book’s strength is its wonderful detail. We follow Nathan as he meets his grizzled Russian spymaster “George” in San Francisco, Lima, Mexico City and Malta; we track the FBI agents on his trail. The feds wouldn’t let Jim talk to Denson, but we end the book with a strong sense of the two-time spy’s plans and motives. Clever and narcissistic, Jim did love his son. But he had no compunction about turning him into his “last asset.”

 

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In his early Cold War novels, John le Carré referred to something called “Moscow Rules”: the tradecraft used by spies in a hostile city when they had to be super-cautious to avoid getting caught. If you want to learn the 21st-century equivalent of those rules, The Spy’s Son is a great place to start—although in real life, they don’t always work as smoothly as in fiction.

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