Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a great movie this book would make, September 21, 2005
A wonderfully written, exciting, unbelievable but true story that keeps your attention with new developments on every page. Imagine a defector hunted by the FBI who creates a new life in the Soviet bloc, learns the language, marries, rises to the top in his professional field, and 40 years later returns to the US. What was his life like for the 40 years behind the Iron Curtain? Why did he spy and defect? Imagine a woman who abandons her husband and children for a lover and defects with him, not knowing that she will not be able to return to her kids for decades, and then she reunites with them. This books combines elements of a spy thriller, a historical documentary, and a romantic novel, covering a variety of topics, from the roots of communist ideology among Americans and the history of computer and weapons development, to a spy's personal life that involved a Russian mistress and a Czech wife. This book shows life in Russia during the Cold War from the perspective of American communists. Well-researched and thoroughly documented, I think this book would make a great movie.
|
|
|
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Food for thought, and a good read, December 4, 2005
Nobel Prize recipient Elias Canetti defined the "concentration" of a secret as the ratio between the number of people who know it, and the number of people it might affect. Canetti noted that modern technical secrets were the most concentrated type of secret because they have the potential to affect everyone, but are known only to a few.
Engineering Communism is about concentrated secrets, and the ties shared secrets create between people who hold them. More particularly, the book is about one of the most successful espionage rings to operate in the U.S., and the U.S.S.R, during the 20th century; how Communism provided meaning, purpose, identity, power, and hope for a small group of people (some still living); and how they managed to continue to Believe once that utopian dream faded for almost everyone else.
One secret I shouldn't keep is that I've known the author for many years, and read early drafts of the book. I was relieved to see it come out so well, as having a secret opinion about the work of a friend can be uncomfortable. There's a video of a talk by the author about the book at
http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1128992115
|
|
|
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An exceptional and important book, supremely well-written and well-reported, January 5, 2007
This book may be one of the most important, if under-appreciated, contributions to Cold War literature. It deserves wide readership. The book breaks vital new ground, thanks to Usdin's talents as a reporter, and provides elemental clarity, thanks to his skill as a writer, to the larger drama of espionage and technological competition between the US and USSR.
Usdin's writing and reporting are both of the highest possible standard.
This compelling story is set first in the mephitic atmosphere of the Brooklyn shtetls of the 1930s, where the bacillus of communist ideology was able to grow, then moving on to the grievance-fueled hothouse of CCNY. When you think of Julius Rosenberg, Greenglass, Sobell, these were men of little talent, who perfectly fit Stalin's description of "useful idiots". But, Barr and Salant -- the two men profiled in Usdin's book -- were clearly of far higher caliber, and so able to do far greater damage to US security. Radars, fire-control mechanisms and proximity fuses aren't as sexy as atomic bombs, but they arguably did more to tilt the balance of terror towards the Soviets during the 1950s.
The two American-born Soviet spies were able, through treachery, to truly alter the course of Cold War history. And yet, as the book discloses, they escaped punishment - not just of the judicial sort, but from within, freed of any guilt for having helped sustain a system that mutilated the lives of so many millions of people.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|