O.'s bookshelf: currently-reading en-US Wed, 18 Sep 2024 21:00:46 -0700 60 O.'s bookshelf: currently-reading 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy]]> 52578861
They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb.

This true-life spy story is about the woman code-named “Sonya.� Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI—and she evaded them all. Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth century—between Communism, Fascism, and Western democracy—and casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times.

With unparalleled access to Sonya’s diaries and correspondence and never-before-seen information on her clandestine activities, Ben Macintyre has written a history of a legendary secret agent, a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decades-long standoff between nuclear superpowers.]]> 377 Ben Macintyre 0593136306 O. 0 currently-reading 4.12 2020 Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy
author: Ben Macintyre
name: O.
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Palace of Treason (Red Sparrow Trilogy, #2)]]> 22609257
From the bestselling, Edgar Award–winning author of the “terrifically good� (The New York Times) Red Sparrow, a compulsively readable new novel about star-crossed Russian agent Dominika Egorova and CIA's Nate Nash in a desperate race to the finish.
Captain Dominika Egorova of the Russian Intelligence Service (SVR) has returned from the West to Moscow. She despises the men she serves, the oligarchs, and crooks, and thugs of Putin’s Russia. What no one knows is that Dominika is working for the CIA as Washington’s most sensitive penetration of SVR and the Kremlin.

As she expertly dodges exposure, Dominika deals with a murderously psychotic boss; survives an Iranian assassination attempt; escapes a counterintelligence ambush; rescues an arrested agent and exfiltrates him out of Russia; and has a chilling midnight conversation in her nightgown with President Putin. Complicating these risks is the fact that Dominika is in love with her CIA handler, Nate Nash, and their lust is as dangerous as committing espionage in Moscow. And when a mole in the SVR finds Dominika’s name on a restricted list of sources, it is a virtual death sentence�

Just as fast-paced, heart-pounding, and action-packed as Red Sparrow, Jason Matthews’s second novel confirms he is “an insider’s insider…and a masterful storyteller� (Vince Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author).

]]> 480 Jason Matthews 1476793743 O. 0 currently-reading 4.13 2015 Palace of Treason (Red Sparrow Trilogy, #2)
author: Jason Matthews
name: O.
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (George Smiley, #5; Karla Trilogy, #1)]]> 10073506 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy begins George Smiley's chess match of wills and wits with Karla, his Soviet counterpart.

It is now beyond a doubt that a mole, implanted decades ago by Moscow Centre, has burrowed his way into the highest echelons of British Intelligence. His treachery has already blown some of its most vital operations and its best networks. It is clear that the double agent is one of its own kind. But which one? George Smiley is assigned to identify him. And once identified, the traitor must be destroyed.]]> 381 John Le Carré O. 0 currently-reading 4.07 1974 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (George Smiley, #5; Karla Trilogy, #1)
author: John Le Carré
name: O.
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton]]> 33574120
A revelatory new biography of the sinister, powerful, and paranoid man at the heart of the CIA for more than three tumultuous decades.

CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton was one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States government in the mid-20th century, a ghost of American power. From World War II to the Cold War, Angleton operated beyond the view of the public, Congress, and even the president. He unwittingly shared intelligence secrets with Soviet spy Kim Philby, a member of the notorious Cambridge spy ring. He launched mass surveillance by opening the mail of hundreds of thousands of Americans. He abetted a scheme to aid Israel’s own nuclear efforts, disregarding U.S. security. He committed perjury and obstructed the JFK assassination investigation. He oversaw a massive spying operation on the antiwar and black nationalist movements and he initiated an obsessive search for communist moles that nearly destroyed the Agency.

In The Ghost, investigative reporter Jefferson Morley tells Angleton’s dramatic story, from his friendship with the poet Ezra Pound through the underground gay milieu of mid-century Washington to the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate scandal. From the agency’s MKULTRA mind-control experiments to the wars of the Mideast, Angleton wielded far more power than anyone knew. Yet during his seemingly lawless reign in the CIA, he also proved himself to be a formidable adversary to our nation’s enemies, acquiring a mythic stature within the CIA that continues to this day.]]> 330 Jefferson Morley 1250080614 O. 0 currently-reading 3.87 2017 The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton
author: Jefferson Morley
name: O.
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/09
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]]> <![CDATA[3001: The Final Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #4)]]> 988503 304 Arthur C. Clarke 0345423496 O. 0 currently-reading 3.57 1999 3001: The Final Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #4)
author: Arthur C. Clarke
name: O.
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/12
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]]> <![CDATA[2061: Odyssey Three (Space Odyssey, #3)]]> 414972 2001: a space odyssey.

It is even more unusual that an author is able to complement so well-received an invention with an equally successful sequel. But Arthur C. Clarke`s 2010: odyssey two enthralled a huge audience worldwide.

Now, in 2061: odyssey three, Arthur C. Clarke revisits the most famous future ever imagined, as two expeditions into space are inextricably tangled by human necessity and the immutable laws of physics. And Heywood Floyd, survivor of two previous encounters with the mysterious monoliths, must once again confront Dave Bowman—or whatever Bowman has become—a newly independent HAL, and the power of an alien race that has decided Mankind is to play a part in the evolution of the galaxy whether it wishes to or not.]]> 273 Arthur C. Clarke 0345358791 O. 0 currently-reading 3.43 1987 2061: Odyssey Three (Space Odyssey, #3)
author: Arthur C. Clarke
name: O.
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[2010: Odyssey Two (Space Odyssey, #2)]]> 414967 2001: A Space Odyssey first shocked, amazed, and delighted millions in the late 1960s, the novel was quickly recognized as a classic. Since then, its fame has grown steadily among the multitudes who have read the novel or seen the film based on it. Yet, along with almost universal acclaim, a host of questions has grown more insistent through the years:

Who or what transformed Dave Bowman into the Star-Child? What purpose lay behind the transformation? What would become of the Star-Child?

What alien purpose lay behind the monoliths on the Moon and out in space?

What could drive HAL, a stable, intelligent computer, to kill the crew? Was HAL really insane? What happened to HAL and the spaceship Discovery after Dave Bowman disappeared?

Would there be a sequel?

Now all those questions and many more have been answered. In this stunning sequel to his international bestseller, Clarke has written what will truly be one of the great books of the '80s. Cosmic in sweep, eloquent in its depiction of Man's place in the Universe, and filled with the romance of space, this novel is a monumental achievement.]]> 335 Arthur C. Clarke 0345303067 O. 0 currently-reading 3.91 1982 2010: Odyssey Two (Space Odyssey, #2)
author: Arthur C. Clarke
name: O.
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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]]> The Odyssey 1381 Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey.

If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey though life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.

In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.

Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb Introduction and textual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles' translation.

This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the public at large, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students.

--

Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning new modern-verse translation.]]> 541 Homer 0143039954 O. 0 currently-reading 3.79 -700 The Odyssey
author: Homer
name: O.
average rating: 3.79
book published: -700
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/11
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