Words From Vaish

The Honest Spy Andreas Kollender Translated by Steve Anderson Amazon Crossing 2017                                                     353 Pages Not all Germans were Nazis... Like the Schindler famous for a celebrated list that salvaged a cross-section of a doomed race during the dark years of the holocaust, Fritz Kolbe detested Nazi ideology and despised party hacks, besides hating Germany’s Fuhrer with a passion that ran dark and deep.  Unlike the playboy-profiteer Schindler, the more principled Herr Kolbe was an insider, being a senior civil servant in the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin. After a promising early career with pre-war diplomatic postings in Spain and South Africa, his continuing refusal to join the Nazi Party saw him ignominiously recalled to Germany and given the lowly job of stamping visas and ...

The Billion Dollar Spy David E Hoffman Icon Books 2015                                                      391 Pages          19 th January 1991: The third day of the first Gulf War. Four McDonnell-Douglas F-15C Eagle fighters of the US Air Force’s 58 th Tactical Fighter Squadron, 33 rd Tactical Fighter Wing, were refuelling in the skies over Saudi Arabia when the call to combat finally came.  A Boeing E-3A Sentry AWACS (Airborne Warning & Control System) aircraft on patrol vectored the quartet of Eagles on four “bogies” – unidentified aircraft - over Iraqi airspace. As the Eagles closed in at slightly over the speed of sound, the bogies were positively iden...

A well-made popular is not to be sneered at. The problem is that there aren’t all that many. A cursory trawl through the display racks of many an airport and railway station book stall reveals the usual suspects; the Dan Browns , John Grishams, J amesPattersons , Jeffrey Archers, et al. The best you can say about many of these prose potboilers is the writing style is pedestrian, the plotting perfunctory, the characters cardboard, the dialogue dully banal. Some, particularly the works of Dan Brown and Eric Van Lustbader, also suffer from laboured Germanic sentence formation that appears to indicate that English is the second language of these authors. You might have ploughed through the kind I’m talking about; with single sentences the size of an average paragraph, packed with subordinate clauses like an overloaded freight train so that the narrative chugs along sluggishly. If simple entertainment is the aim, most fail dismally. Take that doyen of the spy stor...

THE INDIAN SPY Mihir Bose Aleph Books 2017                                                                                                       350 Pages In the course of their clandestine activities, the attitude of spies towards their ostensible masters can evolve towards antagonism. However, the late Bhagat Ram Talwar code-named Silver, the protagonist of The Indian Spy, started off working AGAINST British interests before working for them.   But then, the only quintuple secr...