Kix follows the story through every stage of his hero's acquisitions of the unusual skills with which he would prosecute his war against the Nazis … Kix takes the reader from adventure to adventure, and all of it is narrated with a curiously effective combination of historical perspective and fictional thriller dramatics … Kix's account begins and ends with glimpses of that much older man, recalling the unspoken code of bravery that guided him and his comrades during the Resistance. The reminder that The Saboteur is at heart a hero's tale is very refreshing.
La Rochefoucauld earned a biographer worthy of his improbable life. Even though we know from the book’s prologue that the French aristocrat winds up living a long life, Kix builds narrative tension with masterfully detailed scenes and cliffhanger endings for each chapter … His distancing is admirable, but I kept longing for unintrusive paragraphs and sentences that would have shed light on his mission to excavate and make sense of his discoveries or dead-ends … The Saboteur is completely engrossing and elegantly told, which means any reader of this work will inevitably want more and more.
Kix's real-life adventure book is informed by interviews with members of his subject's family, piles of government records and the now-deceased La Rochefoucauld's autobiography. Kix fastidiously cross-references dates and other facts to keep the timeline aligned with reality and uncolored by clan lore and the protagonist's sometimes fuzzy memory … The ability of Kix...to infuse every chapter with historical fact and analysis makes the book an enjoyable read. He telescopes between the larger themes of the period — the atmosphere of post-invasion France, the rise of the resistance movement, how England's clandestine training program for saboteurs evolved — and his protagonist's unrivaled personal story.
...an odd, ill-judged episode that took place when he was in his late 70s that he [Robert de La Rochefoucauld] is best remembered in France, and this forms both the prelude and the epilogue to Paul Kix’s biography, The Saboteur ... Mr. Kix has consulted numerous diaries, interviewed survivors and spent much time with La Rochefoucauld’s family and friends ...research is meticulous, though small errors have crept in...as Mr. Kix describes it, is a work of 'narrative nonfiction,' and it is written in a novelistic style, with much reported speech and many references to smells, sights, thoughts and feelings not actually possible to corroborate ...book does little to explain the decades of willful amnesia that settled over swathes of French society. But it provides a lively picture of a brave man, for whom patriotism, nobility and duty were immutable principles of life.
One of those résistants, in 1944, was 19-year-old Robert de La Rochefoucauld, the subject of Paul Kix’s intense, highly detailed and well-written book, The Saboteur. Working from La Rochefoucauld’s 2002 memoir, and the video of an oral history produced by the La Rochefoucauld family, Kix has produced a narrative that is both chilling and powerful ... This is first-class adventure writing, which, coupled with a true-life narrative of danger and intrigue, adds up to all-night reading ... Reading The Saboteur, one understands how a certain person at a certain time answered it. La Rochefoucauld faced torture and death, yet he carried on. There is inspiration in his example, and that makes The Saboteur well worth reading.
Kix’s sharp, well-paced writing is perfect for telling La Rochefoucauld’s story. But this is more than a gripping yarn of daring-do. La Rochefoucauld was a complex character, and Kix’s portrait is nuanced and moving … We are fortunate to have Kix’s richly detailed book so we can remember the remarkable courage of an extraordinary man.
Robert de La Rochefoucauld, the titular character in Paul Kix’s new biography The Saboteur, probably would have been a badass even if he hadn’t become a spy or lived through the worst of World War II in France ...Kix, an editor at ESPN The Magazine, explains exactly what it meant for La Rochefoucauld to be a saboteur ... In the book, he [Kix] answers that question and many more, painting a gripping portrait of a person whose bravery doesn’t allow him to succumb to the pressures of the day ... Ultimately, Kix found that writing about the life of Robert de La Rochefoucauld helped him understand more about the way the world has changed in the 21st century.
Throughout, Kix proves to be an adept biographer, avoiding hagiography. It’s all true: the bombings, betrayals, and significant successes, right down to his escape as he was being driven to his execution—and all before he was 21. A winner: the stories are fascinating, the pages nearly turn themselves, and La Rochefoucauld is a true hero.
One of the most remarkable heroes of World War II, a French resistance fighter named Robert de La Rochefoucauld, is a virtual unknown in America ... But Paul Kix, in The Saboteur, is shining a spotlight on the man's larger-than-life secret exploits ...tells the true story of a young man from an aristocratic French family who became a thorn in the side of the occupying Nazis ... The result of his four years of labor reads like a too-good-to-be-true plot from an Alistair MacLean or Jack Higgins thriller. But the tales of derring-do all checked out as completely true.
