2013 Book Review #52: The Spymasters

[jethrien]

Title: The Spymasters: The True Story of Anglo-American Intelligence Operations within Nazi Germany, 1939-1945
Author: Charles Whiting
Genre: History (WWII)
Thingummies: 1

Synopsis: Vaguely incoherent account of random WWII spies.

Title: I was initially going to give this a two. It appears to have been exhaustively researched, and I have no reason to think that it's incorrect.

But you know what? I can't remember anything I've learned from reading this book. Which makes it a complete failure, as far as I'm concerned.

The cover copy lists a bunch of spy stories I'd never heard of, from a plan to flood Germany with pornography to a spy who used a naked bicyclist as a ping-pong net. Thing is, that's the extent to which any of the hinted at stories are told. I just told you all the information on these stories that was contained in the book--each one is a single throw away sentence to the effect that that happened. No details.

What we do get is a whole bunch of completely random spy stories. I figured it would be an explanation of the operatives in Germany, given that that's what the title it says. Instead, it's just random stories. Badly told. With indistinguishable spies, and stakes that are not defined.

The writing here is bad on every possible level. Sentences are poorly constructed, with misplaced modifiers and indistinct pronouns, so as to be extremely difficult to follow in places. Paragraphs are badly structured, footnotes are random, storylines are pointless. The assumptions as to what the reader already knows and doesn't is baffling. I think I'm actually more confused about a lot of these events than I was going in.

Basically, this is an awful book. And apparently the guy wrote a bunch of them. Were people so starved for any info at all in the seventies (when this appears to have been written) that they'd read anything? My library should be embarrassed.

Comments

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

It's one of those problems with contemporaneous spy histories. The first ones are written by the guys with the connections to view the stuff before it's declassified, who are usually mediocre writers. The internal histories of the various agencies are dismal: full of dated bureaucratic jargon, poorly organized, often redacted for bizarre reasons that no longer make any sense, if they ever did.

We seem to have solved this problem in modern America by having the agencies leak so much that even journalists with great writing skills but indifferent connections can get top secret material.