The Fight Over Literature: My Washington Times Review Of 'Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged The Literary Cold War'

The Washington Times published my review of Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.

When one thinks of the Cold War — the era when the two world superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were adversaries from the end of World War II in 1945 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 — perhaps one thinks of Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall, spy vs. spy dramas, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the arms race or Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stating, “We will bury you.”

But in addition to the conflict between spies, soldiers and statesmen, there was another conflict that took place during the Cold War: The fight over literature.

“Between February and May 1955, a group secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency launched a secret weapon into Communist territory. Gathering at launch sites in West Germany, operatives inflated 10-foot balloons, armed them their payload, waited for favorable winds and launched them into Poland.

“They then watched as the balloons were carried deep behind the Iron Curtain, where they would eventually disgorge their contents. These, though, were not explosives or incendiary weapons: they were books,” Duncan White writes in the opening of his book, “Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.”

“At the height of the Cold War, the CIA made copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” rain down from the Communist sky.”

“Cold Warriors is the story of the writers who dealt with the consequences of having literature become a Cold War battleground. 

… Authors around the world were involved in the Cold War conflict, Mr. White explains. “They led double lives as spies, volunteered in foreign wars, engaged in guerrilla insurgencies, churned out propaganda, exposed official hypocrisy, and risked their lives to write books that defied the Cold War consensus.”

Mr. White calls his book a group biography that traces the interconnected lives and works of writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. And the cast of characters is impressive: Graham Greene, John le Carre, Stephen Spender, Ernest Hemingway and others. Some of the writers were leftists whom the Soviets called “useful idiots,” while others, like George Orwell, condemned the Soviet Union’s evil empire.

Mr. White also covers the courageous Russian writers, like Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who defied the all-powerful Soviet regime to write great literature that did not conform with Soviet ideas. The book also covers British spy and traitor Kim Philby, who didn’t write fiction, Mr. White says, he lived it.

I was surprised that the book did not cover thriller writer Ian Fleming more. As a young reporter for Reuters in 1933, he covered the Metro-Vickers espionage trial of British engineers in the Soviet Union. Later, after serving as a naval intelligence officer in World War II, he became the London Sunday Times’ foreign manager and several of his foreign correspondents also reported to British intelligence. And in addition to taking on international criminals, Ian Fleming’s James Bond character battled Soviet spies and assassins. For many readers, James Bond was the ultimate fictional Cold Warrior.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/18/book-review-cold-warriors-writers-who-waged-the-li/ 

My Washington Times Review Of 'Dateline - Liberated Paris'

The Washington Times published my review of Ronald Weber's Dateline – Liberated Paris. 

It was if Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur’s hard-bitten, cynical and profane crime-beat reporter characters from the 1928 play “The Front Page” were all assigned to cover liberated Paris in World War II.

In Ronald Weber’s “Dateline Liberated Paris: The Hotel Scribe and the Invasion of the Press,” an army of war correspondents converged on Paris after the Nazi Germans left the “City of Light” toward the end of the war.

As Mr. Weber explains, in the European combat zones of World War II, press camps were an integral part of Allied operations. Accredited war correspondents attached to combat units dressed in the uniforms of their countries and wore insignia that identified them as correspondents. They were treated as captains, although they wore no insignia of rank.

The correspondents were housed in buildings or tents and they were fed, briefed on war news, and given jeeps with military drivers for transportation by military public-relations officers. The correspondents’ copy, photos, radio broadcasts, field art and personal letters were reviewed by military censors before they were sent out by cable, teletype, mobile radio, or by land and air courier to the international media centers. The press camps followed the combat units as they moved on to new positions.

“The Hotel Scribe was one of several Allied press camps on the march from Normandy to Germany. It was also one of a kind,” Mr. Weber tells us. “Among other distinctive features, it was located in central Paris in a storied hotel that before the war was favored by foreign journalists and during the occupation became the Nazi headquarters for information and propaganda. It had a lounge bar and dining room, an experienced French staff, chambermaids, phone service, running water, electricity, and enough coal for some heat and warm baths in limited hours. It could accommodate as many as five hundred correspondents, as against the fifty or fewer of other press camps.”

The Scribe quickly took on an aura of journalistic legend and folklore, as a good number of correspondents chronicled the hotel as well as the war in their dispatches. The Scribe was also featured in several novels and nonfiction books by the correspondent residents and customers after the war.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/may/20/book-review-dateline-liberated-paris-by-ronald-web/

Happy Birthday To George Orwell, Author Of Animal Farm And Ninteen Eighty-Four

Biography.com notes that today is George Orwell's birthday.

Born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bengal, India, in 1903, George Orwell, novelist, essayist and critic, went on to become best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

George Orwell created some of the sharpest satirical fiction of the 20th century with such works as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and communism.

You can read more about George Orwell via the below link:

http://www.biography.com/people/george-orwell-9429833