About the Author
Peter Eisner has been an editor and reporter at the Washington Post, Newsday, and the Associated Press. His books include the award-winning The Freedom Line and The Italian Letter, which he wrote with Knut Royce. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
Obras de Peter Eisner
MacArthur's Spies: The Soldier, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in World War II (2017) 95 cópias
The Freedom Line: The Brave Men and Women Who Rescued Allied Airmen from the Nazis During World War II (2004) 84 cópias
The Pope's Last Crusade: How an American Jesuit Helped Pope Pius XI's Campaign to Stop Hitler (2013) 77 cópias
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Data de nascimento
- 1950-08-27
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- USA
- País (para mapa)
- USA
Membros
Resenhas
Peter Eisner's book, "MacArthur's Spies" isn't like fictional spy thrillers with undercover agents digging out secret information, confusing and obstructing the enemy, and leading the way to victory on the battlefield. Rather, it's more a book about a small group of Manila citizens during World War II, and how they collected clothes and medicine for Prisoners of War (POWs), and about their efforts to collect and forward information about Japanese activities to Filipino and American guerrillas in the hills. Information about Japanese troops was collected and delivered to guerrillas, however the guerrillas didn't seem to have effective communications with MacArthur's fighting forces, and therefore the activities of these spies didn't seem to play a significant role in the timing nor success of MacArthur's ultimate return to the Philippines.
Much of the book centers on an American woman, Claire Phillips, who was living in Manila when war broke out. She assumed the role of an Italian, and joined a network of others actively opposed to the Japanese occupiers. But she was such a deceptive person throughout her life, it's hard to be sure just how much of her story can be taken at face value. Apparently, much of her post-war story was embellished by her book publicists, by Hollywood screen writers, or by herself. One part of the story which does ring true concerns the hardship that locals and POWs endured during the war. Another part of the story which rings true is that the locals in the Philippines who worked to help the POWs, or gather intelligence from the Japanese, did so at much risk, were extremely brave to do so, and deserve our praise, respect, and admiration, even if they embellished the facts of their deeds to some extent. … (mais)
Much of the book centers on an American woman, Claire Phillips, who was living in Manila when war broke out. She assumed the role of an Italian, and joined a network of others actively opposed to the Japanese occupiers. But she was such a deceptive person throughout her life, it's hard to be sure just how much of her story can be taken at face value. Apparently, much of her post-war story was embellished by her book publicists, by Hollywood screen writers, or by herself. One part of the story which does ring true concerns the hardship that locals and POWs endured during the war. Another part of the story which rings true is that the locals in the Philippines who worked to help the POWs, or gather intelligence from the Japanese, did so at much risk, were extremely brave to do so, and deserve our praise, respect, and admiration, even if they embellished the facts of their deeds to some extent. … (mais)
NORIEGA'S OWN VERSION OF THE TRUTH ONE MAN'S CLOUDED PATH FROM PANAMA TO A
SOUTH DADE PRISON.
Subhead:
Reporter: By GLENN GARVIN, Special to the Herald
Desk:
Source:
Day: Sunday
Dateline:
Print Run Date: 3/23/1997
Text: * America's Prisoner: The Memoirs of Manuel Noriega. Manuel Noriega and Peter Eisner.
Random. 293 pages. $25.
I knew I was in trouble just 13 pages into co-author Peter Eisner's introduction, when he offered
this ringing endorsement of his writing partner Manuel Noriega: "A liar must tell a measure of the
truth." Now there's a cover blurb, right up there with "Most names spelled correctly!" and "Typeset in
a very attractive fashion!"
Alas, simple pleasures like those are pretty much the only ones to be found in America's Prisoner.
You'd think being military dictator of Panama, hobnobbing with the CIA, playing footsie with Fidel
Castro, cuddling up to the Colombia drug mafia, and finally getting ousted by a U.S. invasion would at
the very least provide you with some interesting stories. But Noriega's evidently saving them for the
grandkids. His tendentious book, instead, just serves up one preposterously self-serving fiction after
another:
Sure, the head somehow got chopped off my main political opponent, but I could never figure out
how it happened. When it turned out to have been done by the army I commanded, you could have
knocked me over with a feather!
Not me!
Sure, the elected president of Panama resigned and went into hiding in fear of his life, and sure, he
was replaced by a successor I hand-picked. But I didn't have anything to do with it! The guy was just
scared of our really mean congress!
Sure, the U.S. Army beat me. But only because they fought dirty and used airplanes! And sure,
most of my army broke and ran at the sound of the first shot, but we were all going to regroup in the
mountains and fight a guerrilla war. Really! Except crafty papists bamboozled me into seeking asylum
in the Vatican embassy. Even so, I was preparing a heroic last stand, me against the entire gringo
army, but somebody stole my gun!
Not that Noriega blames everything on somebody else. He does own up to the occasional mistake.
He admits that it would have been much smarter to cancel Panama's 1989 elections earlier instead of
waiting until election day, when it was obvious his puppet candidate was losing in a landslide. "I
miscalculated," Noriega says.
Bush was to blame
Otherwise, he pretty much holds George Bush responsible for everything bad that ever happened in
Panama -- including terrorist bombings of 14 U.S. targets in 1976 during an impasse in negotiations
over the future of the Canal. Well, technically speaking, the bombings were carried out by the
8/3/2020 Details Page
https://sccweb.mcclatchy.com/scripts/sccmgcgi.dll 2/3
Panamanian army, Noriega admits, but only because Bush, who was then director of the CIA, asked
us to do it. Bush, you see, wanted the United States to hurry up and turn the canal over to Panama.
That doesn't exactly reconcile with Noriega's claim a few chapters later that Bush launched the 1989
invasion of Panama to get the canal back , but I suppose Noriega is as entitled to engage in a little
magical realism as any other Latin American author.
Not, I hasten to add, that anyone is going to mistake the prose here for Garcia Marquez's.
America's Prisoner is grim going, plodding and often barely coherent. To be fair, it does have some
moments of unintentional humor. When Noriega dismisses Bush as "once a wimp, always a wimp," I
couldn't help but smile: But he sure kicked your butt, didn't he?
A grand tradition
Lousy books by disgruntled Latin American dictators are a grand tradition in U.S. publishing, going
back at least to Fulgencio Batista's Cuba Betrayed , and ordinarily there would be no need to get
exercised about one more.
But America's Prisoner is a real disservice because its manifest falsehoods will further cloud an
important issue that U.S. journalism and political science have failed to explore: the U.S. invasion of
Panama. For the purported purpose of capturing a single drug dealer, we destroyed half a city and
killed 400 bystanders, not to mention 23 of our own soldiers. Yet there is no evidence that the supply
of cocaine on U.S. street corners dipped by so much as an ounce.
Part of the reason is that the U.S. government absurdly exaggerated Noriega's drug involvement --
he was no drug lord, just a pipsqueak player who facilitated a few cocaine shipments.
Failed drug policy
The cost of our failed drug policy has been bad enough in the United States, where it has not only
overloaded the criminal justice system but also perverted it. Exhibit A: Noriega's trial, in which
reduced sentences and immunity were handed out like penny candy to any sleazeball willing to take
the witness stand and recite the government version of events.
But in Latin America, the price has been paid in blood. Colombians, Peruvians and Bolivians are
being asked -- or, rather, told -- to lay down their lives to help suppress our drug consumption. If 400
innocent people had been killed in a drug raid in Miami or San Francisco, we would have found out
who was responsible. When it happened in Panama, no one even asked the question. Someday,
perhaps, someone will. In the meantime, won't someone over at the Metropolitan Correctional Center
please tell Manuel Noriega: Shut up, or we'll send George Bush after you again.
Glenn Garvin, The Herald's Managua bureau chief, is author of Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The
CIA and the Contras.
Published… (mais)
SOUTH DADE PRISON.
Subhead:
Reporter: By GLENN GARVIN, Special to the Herald
Desk:
Source:
Day: Sunday
Dateline:
Print Run Date: 3/23/1997
Text: * America's Prisoner: The Memoirs of Manuel Noriega. Manuel Noriega and Peter Eisner.
Random. 293 pages. $25.
I knew I was in trouble just 13 pages into co-author Peter Eisner's introduction, when he offered
this ringing endorsement of his writing partner Manuel Noriega: "A liar must tell a measure of the
truth." Now there's a cover blurb, right up there with "Most names spelled correctly!" and "Typeset in
a very attractive fashion!"
Alas, simple pleasures like those are pretty much the only ones to be found in America's Prisoner.
You'd think being military dictator of Panama, hobnobbing with the CIA, playing footsie with Fidel
Castro, cuddling up to the Colombia drug mafia, and finally getting ousted by a U.S. invasion would at
the very least provide you with some interesting stories. But Noriega's evidently saving them for the
grandkids. His tendentious book, instead, just serves up one preposterously self-serving fiction after
another:
Sure, the head somehow got chopped off my main political opponent, but I could never figure out
how it happened. When it turned out to have been done by the army I commanded, you could have
knocked me over with a feather!
Not me!
Sure, the elected president of Panama resigned and went into hiding in fear of his life, and sure, he
was replaced by a successor I hand-picked. But I didn't have anything to do with it! The guy was just
scared of our really mean congress!
Sure, the U.S. Army beat me. But only because they fought dirty and used airplanes! And sure,
most of my army broke and ran at the sound of the first shot, but we were all going to regroup in the
mountains and fight a guerrilla war. Really! Except crafty papists bamboozled me into seeking asylum
in the Vatican embassy. Even so, I was preparing a heroic last stand, me against the entire gringo
army, but somebody stole my gun!
Not that Noriega blames everything on somebody else. He does own up to the occasional mistake.
He admits that it would have been much smarter to cancel Panama's 1989 elections earlier instead of
waiting until election day, when it was obvious his puppet candidate was losing in a landslide. "I
miscalculated," Noriega says.
Bush was to blame
Otherwise, he pretty much holds George Bush responsible for everything bad that ever happened in
Panama -- including terrorist bombings of 14 U.S. targets in 1976 during an impasse in negotiations
over the future of the Canal. Well, technically speaking, the bombings were carried out by the
8/3/2020 Details Page
https://sccweb.mcclatchy.com/scripts/sccmgcgi.dll 2/3
Panamanian army, Noriega admits, but only because Bush, who was then director of the CIA, asked
us to do it. Bush, you see, wanted the United States to hurry up and turn the canal over to Panama.
That doesn't exactly reconcile with Noriega's claim a few chapters later that Bush launched the 1989
invasion of Panama to get the canal back , but I suppose Noriega is as entitled to engage in a little
magical realism as any other Latin American author.
Not, I hasten to add, that anyone is going to mistake the prose here for Garcia Marquez's.
America's Prisoner is grim going, plodding and often barely coherent. To be fair, it does have some
moments of unintentional humor. When Noriega dismisses Bush as "once a wimp, always a wimp," I
couldn't help but smile: But he sure kicked your butt, didn't he?
A grand tradition
Lousy books by disgruntled Latin American dictators are a grand tradition in U.S. publishing, going
back at least to Fulgencio Batista's Cuba Betrayed , and ordinarily there would be no need to get
exercised about one more.
But America's Prisoner is a real disservice because its manifest falsehoods will further cloud an
important issue that U.S. journalism and political science have failed to explore: the U.S. invasion of
Panama. For the purported purpose of capturing a single drug dealer, we destroyed half a city and
killed 400 bystanders, not to mention 23 of our own soldiers. Yet there is no evidence that the supply
of cocaine on U.S. street corners dipped by so much as an ounce.
Part of the reason is that the U.S. government absurdly exaggerated Noriega's drug involvement --
he was no drug lord, just a pipsqueak player who facilitated a few cocaine shipments.
Failed drug policy
The cost of our failed drug policy has been bad enough in the United States, where it has not only
overloaded the criminal justice system but also perverted it. Exhibit A: Noriega's trial, in which
reduced sentences and immunity were handed out like penny candy to any sleazeball willing to take
the witness stand and recite the government version of events.
But in Latin America, the price has been paid in blood. Colombians, Peruvians and Bolivians are
being asked -- or, rather, told -- to lay down their lives to help suppress our drug consumption. If 400
innocent people had been killed in a drug raid in Miami or San Francisco, we would have found out
who was responsible. When it happened in Panama, no one even asked the question. Someday,
perhaps, someone will. In the meantime, won't someone over at the Metropolitan Correctional Center
please tell Manuel Noriega: Shut up, or we'll send George Bush after you again.
Glenn Garvin, The Herald's Managua bureau chief, is author of Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The
CIA and the Contras.
Published… (mais)
THE SHADOW PRESIDENT: THE TRUTH ABOUT MIKE PENCE BY Michael D'Antonio is a total hit job on Vice President Pence and on Trump when he could drag him into the text. The book is poorly written and incredibly biased but actually it worked for me in the sense that all the things the author hated about Pence, and that was most everything, were things that I like about Pence. So I came away from the book as a strong supporter of Pence. But it isn't really worth the time to read it.
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Estatísticas
- Obras
- 7
- Membros
- 374
- Popularidade
- #64,496
- Avaliação
- 3.7
- Resenhas
- 11
- ISBNs
- 27
- Idiomas
- 3
Introduction
MacArthur's Spies is a harrowing tale of heroism and espionage in the Philippines during World War II. The author chose to focus on the people and events surrounding three main players: Claire (the primary character and the "Singer" in the title), Boone (the "Soldier"), and Chick Parsons (the "Spymaster"). It is broken into five parts: 1) Claire's life before WWII and the Philippines leading into war with Japan; 2) war in the Philippines and the US surrender; 3) life in the Philippines under Japanese occupation; 4) liberation by the US and life immediately following the war; and finally 5) Claire's life in her later years and her battle to get compensation from the US government.
The story
I call myself a World War II history nut, but I have a shameful confession - I am one of those who focuses mostly on the European theater, especially the Holocaust. I know very little about the Pacific theater, especially other than Pearl Harbor. Shameful, I know! I chose to read this book in an effort to remedy that and I'm sure glad I did. Despite the somewhat misleading title, the book mostly focuses on Claire - her life, her relationships, her many aliases, and her contributions to the resistance efforts. She was a woman of many mysteries, having married at least four times and somehow adopted a little Filipino girl along the way. Though she aspired to be a performer, she wasn't successful until she opened a nightclub in Manila during the Japanese occupation. At that point she became "Madame Tsubaki," and one of the leaders of the efforts to surreptitiously support both the American POWs interred on the islands and the guerrillas hiding in the densely forested hills. Boone was her contact with the guerrillas. He had escaped capture during the US surrender and led a large contingent of American and Filipino fighters. He was in direct contact with General MacArthur himself via the spymaster, Chick Parsons. Chick had originally escaped imprisonment by masquerading as a somewhat-legitimate diplomat. After his escape, he asked to return and be put to work in the efforts to recapture the Philippines. Without spoiling too many details, we know the historical outcome - MacArthur did indeed return in resounding triumph to liberate the Philippines and vanquish the evil (in this instance) Japanese. He credited much of the success of his campaign to the intelligence gathered by Claire, Boone, Parsons, and their extended network. Many American POWs and guerrillas also owed their lives to Claire and others who provided supplies and money whenever possible. Claire returned to the US a hero. She even wrote a book and had a movie made, although both suffered from the Hollywood effect of an over-eager ghost writer. She spent years trying to get compensation from the US government for all of the money she spent of her own funds to help the guerrillas and POWs. Due to many factors, including the incredible number of people making similar claims, Claire only received a fraction of what she spent. The Filipino people honored her sacrifice after her death by memorializing her in the capitol building in Manila.
Literary analysis
This book was written by a reporter, and as such it carries with it that style. It is fast-paced and filled with facts expounded by conjecture. Mr. Eisner did a ton of research, even dusting off the court documents from Claire's claim. He is to be commended for his hard work in being thorough, even traveling to the Philippines and interviewing family members and survivors. Claire was a mysterious character and given what little is truly known about her identity, Mr. Eisner did a wonderful job of making her an intriguing character. I only wish he'd been able to expound more on Boone and his troops, or on Chick Parson's harrowing experiences being spirited back and forth behind enemy lines on submarines. There's no doubt that Claire was a hero in her own right; I just would have liked to know more about the other heroes listed in the title (namely Boone and Parsons).
The format in the digital version was all over the place and at times this made it difficult to read. However, I have a feeling this is due to it being an advanced copy adapted for Kindle (similar to a PDF) and is not the fault of the publisher or author.
There were also times that sentences and/or phrases were awkwardly repeated, or the editing wasn't complete so that the sentence structure was clumsy. Again, with a final edit I'm sure this will be corrected. It in no way detracted from the story itself.
My only other criticism is that I would have like to have seen any photos that survived. The author mentions a specific photo - that of Peggy in front of the Tsubaki Club - several times. Why wasn't it included? Again, this might be due to the nature of this particular digital format. Still, I might have to google that photo as well as others of Claire, Boone, etc. They're such intriguing characters!
Conclusion
While I still maintain that the title is a little misleading (this is really a book about Claire, with asides about her "supporting cast" and "costars"), the book itself is very enlightening. I had no idea that the Philippines were so crucial in the Pacific war, let alone how much the American POWs and Filipinos suffered (aside from the Bataan Death March - everyone knows about Bataan...I hope...). I would definitely recommend this book for it's educational value alone, let alone the heroism of the people it portrays. I will always have the utmost respect for "The Greatest Generation," especially after reading accounts such as this. I am grateful to Mr. Eisner for highlighting these international heroes!… (mais)