MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewAn exhaustive — and, at times, exhausting — attempt to restore the lost state to the historic significance she feels it has been denied ... Impressively researched ... Hoyer also draws sharp portraits of the hardened German Communists ... Tepid descriptions are among this important book’s weaknesses ... Hoyer makes a strong case for paying the vanished state its historical due. But her well-told stories of valiant East Germans are a tribute to human resilience under brutal conditions — not a credit to the state itself.
Ben Macintyre
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWe have at last, in Ben Macintyre’s Agent Sonya, the tale of a fully fleshed-out female spy. Not a femme fatale with a tiny pistol in her purse ... a real-life heroine worthy of his gifts as John le Carré’s nonfiction counterpart ... It boggles the mind how a woman with so many domestic responsibilities—a husband and two children—could find time for spy drops and transmitting coded messages. But Sonya was the consummate multitasker, now cooking dinner, now cooking up explosives to blow up railways. Domesticity was the perfect cover ... The flat-footedness and sexism of the British secret services is one of Macintyre’s entertaining subplots ... Macintyre gives an enthralling account of the territory that exists between devotion to the cause and sheer love of the game. But hovering over this tale is a question that Macintyre deals with only in passing ... Sonya excused brutalities far too lightly, and never disavowed the faith. She sacrificed everything—family, friends and morality—for a dream built on lies.
