Book Review: Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre

A friend who read a review that I had written on The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva suggested that since I enjoyed reading about British double-cross espionage during World War II I might like Agent Zigzag, a true account of love, espionage and betrayal . And she was right. 

While I had learned a fair bit about how the British concocted a very daring and remarkable deception plan to deceive the Nazis, Agent Zigzag completed my 'education' and I knew all the spy masters by name now, if not their complete personality, on both the British and German sides. Well, almost, anyway. There is one more deception, a very famous dead body operation called Operation Mincemeat, which I will write a review on when I'm finished with it.

Eddie Chapman was the most unlikely hero I had ever come across. He began his life as a criminal and was a member of the Jelly Gang who used chewing gum to stick the gelignite to the safes on their heists. 

And yet, he was also a gentle criminal. He abhorred the use of violence in his crimes. He was also a very charming young man, and made friends easily, both of the female and male gender. This was a man with two fiancées at the same time! 

He was serving a sentence in Jersey when the Nazis took control of the island. And so began a story that was more astounding than fiction. His British handlers codenamed him 'Zigzag' due to his erratic personality.

The book's account is taken from documents released by the British Secret Service MI5 to the UK National Archives in 2001 and is a must read for fans of espionage. 

Book Review: The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended to by a bodyguard of lies" ~ Sir Winston Churchill

When I accessed my blog today, I was shocked to see that the last post was more than a month ago. Time flies without the courtesy of a memo. And what have I been doing for the past one month? Well, I'm not going to bore you with the minute, mundane details of my life. Suffice to say, I was minding my own business, and perhaps a friend's or two's.....yes, I can be quite interested in my friends' lives, to put it mildly.  

Hang on....what has that got to do with a book review post? Nothing. I'm just rambling.

When I buy books, I tend to stick to authors I know. Reading can be a rather expensive hobby in Malaysia, if you are a voracious reader like me, so it makes sense to stick to what you know. However, when a book is given to you for free, you are less picky. And that was how I got my first chance to read Daniel Silva's works, a free Kindle e-book, courtesy of a friend "S".

To be honest, The Unlikely Spy isn't his first book that I've read. I read The Confessor, and liked it enough to take the trouble to google him and found that The Unlikely Spy was his first book, published in 1996, and which some of his fans think is still his best work yet.

While some of the characters and events are fictional, The Unlikely Spy is based on very real events during World War II. The very complex and detailed deception conjured up by the British Intelligence totally fascinated me. Imagine producing fake army tanks, fictitious army units, and so on. It's one big massive deception that rivals Hollywood blockbuster movies. 

The story was cinematic in its scope. I felt I was watching a Hollywood blockbuster instead of reading an e-book on the small Kindle screen. I was so involved in the story that I took the Kindle with me to the treadmill when it was time to work out at the gym. It's definitely a page-turner and if you would like to learn how the British fooled the Nazis and caused Hitler to make all the wrong decisions, pick up this book. The book is based on Operation Fortitude  

Book Review: Girl In Translation by Jean Kwok

Girl In Translation is a refreshing book, profound in its simplicity. Kimberley, the protagonist, migrated from Hong Kong to the U.S. with her mother at a very young age and lived in extreme poverty in the squalors of Brooklyn, with no heating in their roaches and rats infested apartment. To keep warm during the cold winter, they turned on the oven in the kitchen and piled layers after layers of clothes over themselves. They also did not speak much English and Kimberley struggled for a very long time in school. 

Although the characters and the plot are fictitious, nevertheless such extreme poverty exists. It's stark in its bleakness, but in the end, Kimberley triumphed and rose above her station to give her mother a better life, at the expense of her own love life.

In fact, when I read about the author's early childhood in her website, it was as if she had written a memoir in Girl In Translation, and just changed the name of the protagonist.

This book managed to transport me into a different world, and I was totally engrossed in the struggles of this young, brave, talented girl. I would not be surprised if some movie producer contacted the author for film copyrights. If a film is made based on this novel, I would definitely watch it. That said, I'm looking forward to more books from this author.

Book Review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Normally, I prefer to watch a movie first, then only read the book if I like the movie. But in the case of Never Let Me Go, I read from the comments in IMDB that it is better to read the book first before watching the movie. One movie-goer even went so far as to say that if you haven't read the book you won't understand what the movie is about as a lot of the details were left out.

Well, I've read the book but haven't got around to watching the movie yet. It's still sitting there in my computer. Never Let Me Go is told from the perspective of Kathy, one of the three protagonists. They were clones though they were not sure if they were modeled from a real person. Their purpose for existing is to be organ donors, though Kathy and her two friends, Ruth and Tommy, yearned for a normal life.

Sounds familiar? Yes, it is along the same lines as the movie "The Island". But unlike "The Island", the clones did not escape.

They didn't have their freedom curbed like the clones in "The Island", but they never made any effort to escape. It made me think and wonder why. I guess perhaps they were afraid to leave the world they know and venture out into the unknown? So many opportunities were lost, and in the end, Kathy was left with questions like what if they had done something before it was too late.

It also made me think deeply of how sometimes science chooses to ignore the obvious. A clone is also a human being, not a "creature" to be reviled like a spider. He or she has emotions, just like a real human. What right then, do we have for creating a sentient being only to ask him to serve his purpose for existence by donating his organs and when the critical organs were donated, the clone shuts down (the term is referred to as 'complete' in the book) and is only kept alive with the aid of machines until the very last organ has been donated? It sounds pretty inhumane to me. I hope in the real world, science won't get that far.

Book Review: Night by Elie Wiesel

Books. Some are hard to put down. Some make you laugh. Some make you cry. And then there are some that make you think very deeply. Night by Elie Wiesel falls into this last category.

Although the first edition of this book was published in September 1960, and Oprah Winfrey selected the book for her book club in January 2006, hubby and I only came to know of this book a week ago by chance.

We were in our room at Resorts World Hotel at Genting, watching Vision Four, an in-house video channel, and it was showing an old documentary of Elie Wiesel giving an acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize for this book.

The book is about the author's experience in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald at the height of Holocaust and toward the end of the Second World War. He was sixteen years old when the US Army finally liberated Buchenwald.

What got me thinking deeply was that in the book, every human value, every moral was destroyed. Would anyone dream of abandoning their parent, whom they had clung to tenaciously  for the past one or three years to avoid being separated suddenly wished that the parent would die so that they would be free to have a better chance at survival? Or would a loving child jump on the father and beat him to death so as to grab that piece of bread crumb from him? Would a child who would retaliate against anyone who so much as laid a finger on his father lie quietly in a bunk above the same father and listened to him being beaten to death by the soldiers for fear of attracting the blows upon himself?

These are not the unfilial, rebellious children. But circumstances, or to be more exact, the horrors of the concentration camps have changed them. The human survival instinct kicked in. It became a "each man for himself, there is no fathers, no brothers here".

I kept asking myself, would I become like one of them, too, if I am in that situation? I don't know, since I haven't been through any suffering. I really hope I can rise above that selfish human instinct to survive, but I sure hope I don't live to experience it to get the answer.

The book was written in an easy-to-read narrative, and if I have a Book Club like Oprah Winfrey, I too would select it for my club and encourage everyone to read it. If nothing else, at least the reader will learn something: When there's a conflict, we must take sides. To remain silent is not being neutral. Being silent is condoning the actions of the oppressor and further victimizing the oppressed. The world was silent, and in being silent, a monster (Hitler) came into being.

Book Review: The Obama Diaries by Laura Ingraham

Is The Obama Diaries fact or fiction?

According to the author, Laura Ingraham, she saw a thick manila envelope lying on the bonnet of her car at the basement parking of Watergate Complex. As she picked it up, a mysterious stranger "hidden in the shadows of a stairwell called out in a deep baritone voice, "Just read it. You'll know what to do." She shouted back, "Who are you? What is this?!" The mystery man stood silent for a few seconds before vanishing...."(page 9)

When she opened the envelope at the W hotel about a hundred yards from the White House (she claimed she didn't drive home as she was afraid to), she discovered that the envelope contained the handwritten diaries of President Barrack Obama, Michelle Obama, her mother Marian Robinson, Vice President Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, and others who are involved in the Obama's Presidency campaign.

And so she decided that the rest of America deserves to know what their President, the First Lady, The First Grandmother, the Vice-President and the entire campaign team had written in their diaries. 

My first thought was, wasn't that rather convenient? The busiest people in the world actually has the time to write a diary and they ended up in her hands? I also thought that the part about the mystery man in the shadows booming out to her to read it and that she'd know what to do with it sounds a little bit like a bad script out of a B-grade movie.

Anyway, I decided to continue reading. My conclusion was, those "diaries" were not authentic. Why? Well, besides the suspicions I expressed in the paragraph above, Barrack Obama had worked very hard in the campaign. It just didn't make any sense that he would trivialize his own inauguration. But most of all, it is the language used in the "diaries". The language used was that of a gossip-monger passing on a juicy, slanderous gossip to another. To me, the style of writing was not the type one would use when writing a personal diary. I could be wrong, of course.

Based on the above, I think the diaries were either planted, or Laura Ingraham cooked up the whole thing on her own as a publicity stunt at best, or as a hatred campaign against Obama. 

She certainly came across as very anti non-Americans. She considered being American as an exceptional and special race, and that America had a right to dictate to the rest of the world. But that was just my personal opinion. I'm curious to know what others think. 

Book Review: Under The Dome by Stephen King

I just finished reading this book last night. It was released in the US in November last year, and I only managed to lay my hands on a copy of the e-book last week. 

Under The Dome is definitely one of the better stories written by Stephen King. Don't get me wrong, he has written quite a few can't-put-it-down books, and I am a die-hard fan of his. But this book is really something else. It's not King's usual scare-you-shitless book, although I love to be scared silly.. Rather, it is more like Carrie or Misery, a book on human characters and what they're capable of. If you have read Carrie/Misery or seen the movies, you would know what I mean. 

The story opens on a beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, a small town in Maine, with a population of 1152 when inexplicably, the town is cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crashed into it, animals are cut into half, cars imploded upon impact, people with electronic devices like pacemaker exploded when they got too near it, while families who went on errands in neighbouring towns are unable to return home.

That said, 90% of the story is not about blood and gore. Instead, it focuses on the town folks, on how they react and change in the face of 'catastrophe'. 

I couldn't stop talking about the book to my hubby. I was sure it would be made into a TV movie, and this morning, the minute I woke up, I troll the net to see if there is any plans to make a movie out of it. And....I wasn't surprised to find that Steven Spielberg has already bought rights to Under The Dome to make it into a mini-series. I can't wait to watch it.

Who Goes To Genting?

What do you do to amuse yourself in the car on an outstation trip, especially if you're not the driver?  Some women I know are very helpful, volunteering their services as co-drivers, telling their husbands to brake, slow down, or go faster before the light changes to red. Some act as eyes for their blind husband, telling them there's a car on the left, stay on the centre of the lane, and so on.

Me, I'm not so helpful. I prefer to entertain myself by doing what I call a random survey of who the travellers are. Or to be more accurate, where the travellers are from. I take note of the registration plates, and categorize them into their respective states, eg., A is from Perak, J is from Johor, and so on.

My latest 'project' was counting the cars on my way out of the car park at Genting today, from Level B5 at First World Hotel (where we parked our car) to the exit of the car park at Level B9. I started doing that as there was a traffic jam inside the car park and I was bored.

So, who goes to Genting? Where are they from? Most of them are from KL, Selangor, Johor, Singapore, with a handful from Penang, Perak, Negeri Sembilan, Pahang, Melaka in that order and two from Kelantan. I was mostly surprised to find that 33% of the cars were from Johor with 8% from Singapore. I would have expected them to go to Resorts World Sentosa or Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, instead of driving 5 hours or so to Genting Highlands. 

Hmmm.....I'd love to find out more about their demographic profile.....yeah, I'm quite nosy.

Book Review: Dewey - The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron

Dewey The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World is a true story about an abandoned, tiny, bedraggled, nearly frozen kitten in the night drop box of the Spencer Public Library which grew up to be an inspiration to the townsfolk.

I just finished reading it yesterday and I must say, I really loved this book even though the ending made me cry.

Imagine, me a grown woman, sitting on a bench at a public clinic waiting for my mum's turn to pick up her hypertension prescription, weeping openly as I came to page #258. I just couldn't stop the tears from rolling down my cheeks when I read that Dewey was about to die.

A little girl who sat on another bench to my left walked over to me and sat down next to me. She kept looking up into my face as I sniveled away. I couldn't help it. I tried to control myself but the tears refused to stop.

Thoughts of how one day Blackie has to go, too, careened into my mind. Followed by thoughts of losing my loved ones one day as age & death claimed them. I cried for Dewey, I cried for Blackie who is still alive, and I cried for living human beings......extremely silly, isn't it?

Anyway, I am glad Vicki Myron and her friends thought to publish some of Dewey's videos in their website. Check out this handsome, inspiring orange cat here - http://www.deweyreadmorebooks.com/deweyvideos.php

Book Review: Hoax by Robert K. Tanenbaum

If you've never read Robert Tanenbaum's 16th book, HOAX, don't bother. This novel has the dubious honour of being the worst book I've ever read. To call it crap would be too kind to it.

I have heard of Robert Tanenbaum's books, and they are supposed to be really good. So, a few months ago, when I saw Hoax at a book warehouse sale, I grabbed it.

And boy, have I regretted that purchase. Three quarters of Hoax is devoted to rehashing after rehashing of Butch Karp, a New York Assistant District Attorney, and his wife's personal history that has no bearings on the plot, and the retelling of events from the different characters' viewpoint that has no relevance to the story, nor do they move the plot along. It's amateurishly-written, something you might expect a Secondary Three (Grade 9) student to write.

When I finally finished the book, I went on the internet to see if it was just me, or if others felt the same. What I found surprised me.

It appears that Robert Tanenbaum is not the real writer of the previous 15 books. The real writer was his cousin, Michael Gruber, who has since split from the partnership and branched out on his own. The general consensus was that either the real Robert Tanenbaum can't write, or the new writer hired to replace Michael Gruber can't.

No wonder it was such a torturous read. If you want to punish your enemies, make them read Hoax!!