Customer Reviews

Spies' Wives

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

WOW!! I have a new respect for the young women who accompanied their CIA husbands over seas. All we ever heard about here was what an easy life they had with their big houses and maids and nannies. We thought that all they had to do was fill their time with fun. No one was able to tell us the real truth. After reading their wonderfully poignant stories (some times sad, some times funny, but always fascinating) I am filled with gratitude and respect for those who made it all the way and even those who didn't. This makes great reading for anybody. It is easy to pick up for just a few minutes at a time but I bet that once you get started you won't be able to put it down for long.

I received this book as a gift and it sat on a shelf for several months before I took it with me on a trip. I wish I had picked it up earlier, as I enjoyed it very much. It's a quick read and gives a good feel for what it must be like to be married to a CIA agent. The wives have great stories to tell. Now I know something about what those people who were supposedly working for the State Dept. were really doing. I was impressed by the resiliance of the wives and families who had to endure much more hardship and uncertainty in strange countries than I had imagined.

A truly unique compilation of persoal stories, this book gives a fun, and often moving, picture of the family life of many spies. There is nothing else like it in print.

Great book! Full of wonderful stories and so interesting to see how this line of work affected the families of CIA agents! Even the stories the kids told gave one a greater appreciation of what it could be like to have one or both parents in the CIA and travel to all kinds of locations. Great buy!!!

This is an easy read about the families of CIA agents. Some of the stories will have you laughing out loud , some will touch your heart.

I once said that the CIA fights for the American Way, hopefully Justice, but probably not Truth. An amusing but not inaccurate discription.
The CIA has attracted a great deal of fascination. It has several images. Sometimes it is a malevolent machine. Othertimes it is a band of superheros fighting the forces of darkness. And othertimes it is incompetant and overpoliticized. I myself lean towards the last on the principle that a Malevolent government agency is too dramatic, and a Heroic one is contrary to human nature, but incompetance in a Federal institution sounds about right.

But this book is about what it is like to live in the real CIA. For believe it or not spies have family too. While James Bond can be satisfied with a troop of cartoonish and disposeable women that have an amuseing resemblance to an Ottoman harem(I would have fired him as a security risk a long time ago if I ran the British Secret Service), real spies do in fact have real lives.

A spy, like a soldier, has a profession that demands of his family extreme tolerance of separation and stress. Added to that, it requires the wife and family to trust someone who is after all a trained deciever and psychological manipulator. Given that it is a wonder that any CIA agents have any real family life. And yet human nature is remarkably adaptable and somehow it is done.
This book gives a series of anecdotes from spy families. Some are sad, some are interesting and some are amusing. But in any case the book gives a human side to people who sacrifice a lot to protect their country.

This book just did not maintain my attention enough for me to complete it. I loved the idea and the short story format was excellent. Yet, the "tone" of the storyteller was boring. I felt that in trying to be witty and relay the stories with amusement and excitement, the authors sounded adolescent. Perhaps a sequel with more polished writing would be an improvement.

I will not be reading this book again. It is a collection of other people's memories. In some of them you have no idea what they are talking about, unless you were there. Others are self-serving. Others are whiny. A few are amazing and give the insight I was hoping to see, but not enough. This is an excellent idea for a book, it just need to be written better.