Spymaster: My Life in the CIA

Book Description

The death of CIA operative Theodore G. "Ted" Shackley in December 2002 triggered an avalanche of obituaries from all over the world, some of them condemnatory. Pundits used such expressions as "heroin trafficking," "training terrorists," "attempts to assassinate Castro," and "Mob connections." More specifically, they charged him with having played a major role in the Chilean military coup of 1973.

But who was the real Ted Shackley? In Spymaster, he has told the story of his entire remarkable career for the first time. With the assistance of fellow former CIA officer Richard A. Finney, he discusses the consequential posts he held in Berlin, Miami, Laos, Vietnam, and Washington, where he was intimately involved in some of the key intelligence operations of the Cold War. During his long career, Shackley ran part of the inter-agency program to overthrow Castro, was chief of station in Vientiane during the CIA's "secret war" against North Vietnam and the Pathet Lao, and was chief of station in Saigon. After his retirement, he remained a controversial figure. In the early eighties, he was falsely charged with complicity in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Ted Shackley's comments on CIA operations in Europe, Cuba, Chile, and Southeast Asia and on the life of a high-stakes spymaster will be the subject of intense scrutiny by all concerned with the fields of intelligence, foreign policy, and postwar U.S. history.

Customer Reviews:

A middle of the road biography.......2007-09-04

In this book Ted Shackley recounts his career as a CIA officer. He spends the bulk of his time writing about his experiences as an administrator in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. There is very little in this memoir that jumps off the page. There are some interesting tidbits about CIA sponsored indiginous para-military ops into China during the 1960's and info about communist China sending a military mission to aid the Pathet Lao command in Sam Neua Province, a location which would later play a camio role in post war MIA-POW issues. Shackley finishes up his watered down biography by minimizing his role in role in the overthrow of Marxist President Allende of Chile. In fact he writes about his involvement in the Allende coup with the circumspection of a man whom does not want his statements read into the transcript against himself at the Haig. Overall Shackley's biography contained too much CYA to be really good.

Ted Shackley - CIA BS Master.......2007-08-07

The first few chapters are good. Shackley, via Finley, does provide a nice outline for understanding the various traditional missions CIA is tasked with. Ted provides a much better view of Bill Harvey than I had ever read before.

The book falls short when Ted writes about the Vietnam War. First, Ted claims to have known nothing about CIA involvement in world heroin distribution. Mr. Shackley claims that it was those awful USAID guys who were the cowboys running drugs in concert with some rogue Laotian's. Anyone who has investigated this mess knows that Edgar "Pop" Buell was in charge of this "assistance" program along with his sidekick alleged CIA Sky operative George Cosgrove. They reported to CIA because they handled the military logistics for the entire Laotian area of operation.

A second area of the book, which I found ingenuous was Ted's alleged hatred for the Phong Hoa or "Pheonix Project." Clean Ted claims that he and all of the good CIA staff found Phoenix "repugnant." Shackley looses sight of the fact that Phoenix was the most successful CIA operation of that war. In contrast, Ted's own Sky operations failed miserably by settling for the establishment of listening posts along the Ho Chi Mihn Trail. If Ted had demanded that NVA convoys be interdicted by ground forces from the Mu Gia Pass to Tchepone, the South Vietnamese might have won that sorry war. If you think I am wrong, ask yourself did Shackley fail to become the director because he wasn't one of the skull and bones or was it because Colby outperformed him during the Vietnam era?

The CIA Laotian operations ended up getting generations of Hmong males killed. By the end of the war, CIA was employing boys so young that they could not operate in the field. CIA called them "Hill Sitters" because they were restricted to defensive positions at base camps. There were so few men that Thai mercenaries were utilized to defend these camps from being overrun. How is that for being repugnant?

Anyway, Only real historians need read this book because only someone with prior knowledge will be able to sift fact from congressional testimony. Read "The Blood Road" by John Prados and "The Politics of Heroin" by Alfred McCoy before you read this book.

Essential, Incomplete, Deceiving.......2006-10-09

I would normally have given this book only three stars for its incompleteness and deception (outlined below), but Ted Shackley was arguably a giant in the clandestine world, and whatever his crimes of omission or commission might have been, I consider this a "must read" for anyone who wishes to move beyond the entry level in the clandestine service. I note with respect that B. Hugh Tovar, himself an accomplished officer, writes the Foreword.

Shackley's career covered all the hotspots, from attempting regime change in Cuba to Berlin Cold War operations to Laos where he excelled while killing tens of thousands, to Viet-Nam where he helped cook the books and ramp up the "report count" (the CIA equivalent of the body count), to Chile to Iran Contra in his afterlife. I pay particular deference to the author's discovery that the combination of US air power for surveillance, mobility, and fire support, with indigenous irregulars, constituted a new form of warfare, one CIA executed well in Afghanistan.

This personal account is grotesquely incomplete. The author has essentially provided a "CIA Lite" account that is not as much fun as Mile Copeland's "Without Cloak or Dagger," not nearly as revelatory as "Blond Ghost" by David Corn, which clearly rankled the author and perhaps drove him to devise this account; and not nearly as detailed as any of the books on Viet-Nam including those by Snepp, De Forest, and of course Allen, whose "None So Blind" is the definitive work. There is no mention of Sam Adams or the author's acquiescence in false force reports demanded by General Westmoreland and the politically-motivated Ambassador. There is also no mention of his role as a recruiter and funder of Zbigniew Brzezinski when the latter was a student here in the USA and Shackley was a Polish-speaking case officer trolling for influentials. The book is yet to be written on the triangle between Shackley, Breziznski, and the mandarins of the extreme right like Dick Cheney, all of whom agreed that the capture of the Caspian Sea energy and the Eurasian region was a priority for the 21st Century.

This personal account is also extremely deceptive. The naive reader who is not widely read or is lacking in professional experience will not be familiar with the very deep literature on drug running and money laundering that was pioneered by CIA officers working out of Laos in the Viet-Nam era, and its subsequent evolution into the Nugen Hand and BCCI money laundering bank activities. Nor is there mention here of the Safari Club or other notorious alliances by select elements of the CIA with South Africa, Argentina, or Saudi Arabia. The account also ignores any reference to the alleged activities of Ted Shackley in running arms to the Contras and bringing drugs back into America via Southern Air Transport, going onwards to Europe to convert the drugs into money and the money into more arms for the Contras (against the will of Congress).

Within this book, the author is at pains to document that he forbade any drug activity to be associated with Air America or any of his operations in Laos, that he conducted spot checks, and on one occasion intercepted and then publicly burned a case of high-grade opium.

He concludes the book with some moderate recommendations for change, but most interestingly for me, as the international proponent for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), he states on page 282 that the world has changed to such an extent (i.e. commercial access to Russia and China and other previously denied areas) that fully 80% of any secret wish list from 1991 can today be satisfied with overt means, including overt human legal travelers. We agree on this important point, which most of the U.S. Intelligence Community continues to deny.

I read this book with care, in part because as resident in Viet-Nam from 1963-1967, and as a clandestine case officer in Central America during very ugly times, I feel I have walked in this ghost's shadow.

I have three bottom lines:

1) By any standard, this was an extraordinary officer who performed at the very top of the profession as it was then defined. He earned the respect of his Laotian counterparts, and I have absolutely no doubt that those whom he was charged with impressing or serving, were impressed and served.

2) Much of what he did was covert action of questionable legality and value, such as the pin prick sabotage attacks against Cuba, but this was not his fault, it was the fault of an extraordinarily stupid political system in America (Bobby Kennedy exceeded Ollie North on the idiot standard in our world).

3) Finally, we have the question mark. I have no direct knowledge, but I venture to suggest that Ted Shackley, according to multiple accounts in the published literature, was at least indirectly if not directly associated with a number of criminal or extra-legal adventures. I do not believe he profited personally--I believe he felt that whatever he was doing was in the service of his government, but like so many others, I do wonder if he did not confuse loyalty to the system with integrity in preserving the Constitution.

Hence, I believe this book, and the author's life, were one third heroic, one third mundane, and one third highly questionable--not because he lacked honor, but because the system that he served lacked honor.

My(?) Life in the CIA.......2005-09-09

Shackley tells his tale of a career in the CIA. This is not a biography of everything he did and is not intended to be. There are no secrets revealed here. Instead, is an honest look at what life in the CIA was like for Shackley. In the foreword it is suggest that the word 'My' could have been left out of the title. This is a fair assessment of the book.

The book does not read like a novel, but neither it is a dry retelling of historical events. Instead, Shackley uses many different stories to explain different topics such as the use of Air America, Public Relations and Counterintelligence. Details are left to a minimum. Anecdotes such as having to leave behind his daughter's rocking horse because it was too big for the moving allowance or getting overly drunk at a ritual going away party in Laos show the human side of the job.

Why 4 Stars?:
Shackley and Finney tell some good stories and show a lot about what it is like to have a career in the CIA. The book is not meant to be a tell-all of CIA operations and it does not attempt to do so; it fits with the no-nonsense manner that Shackley was known for. Unfortunately, about 50 pages in the middle were just plain boring; my advice to readers is to just barrel through them becuase it gets better and there are a few good pieces of CIA life in there. At times, the book follows chronologically, but there is also quite a bit of jumping around. This weak timeline makes it hard to use as a reference. All in all, it does give an account of a CIA Officer's career and what it was like to be involved in those events.

Omissions, omissions, omissions.......2005-06-14

Shackley could have chosen to enlighten us about what he learned as head of CIA's Miami office in the months before and after the JFK assassination. He chose not to do so. There is no mention of many issues raised in other books that he could have discussed to make a major contribution to history. He never mentions Operation 40, or operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (which Oswald made famous by his association with it), or the efforts of anti-Castro operatives to blame Castro for JFK's murder (which he would have known a lot about), or his testimony to the House Assassinations Committee, or his knowledge of operatives, or alleged operatives, accused over the years of complicity in the events preceding JFK's murder. On the other hand, there is ample coverage, with many pictures, of the award ceremonies in his honor, if you are interested in that sort of thing. I wonder why this self-named "Spymaster" bothered to write this book.

Amazon.com

While the 16 years that have passed since the first edition of this book hit the stands have been marked by an increase in sensitivity toward many ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities, the easy acceptance of stereotypes and prejudices in the portrayal, depiction of, and reporting about Islamic peoples has remained largely constant. In this updated version of this rigorous but engaging volume Edward Said looks at how American popular media has used and perpetuated a narrow and unfavorable image of Islamic peoples, and how this has prevented understanding while providing a fictitious common enemy for the diverse American populace.

Book Description

From the Iranian hostage crisis through the Gulf War and the bombing of the World Trade Center, the American news media have portrayed "Islam" as a monolithic entity, synonymous with terrorism and religious hysteria. In this classic work, now updated, the author of Culture and Imperialism reveals the hidden agendas and distortions of fact that underlie even the most "objective" coverage of the Islamic world.

Customer Reviews:

A Must Read For The Uneducated Westerner.......2006-06-27

Edward Said is one of my favorite social writers when it comes to Middle Eastern politics. Being a Palestenian Christian, it is obvious he wouldn't simply side with the East because of his religious ties with Islam. The book is very fair in showing exactly how the West's propaganda against the Middle East is a self-fulfilled prophecy. It's undoing will certainly be its downfall. This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand some tenets of journalism and is definately a must read for anyone who has ever taken an anthropology class. Pick it up!

Interesting but flawed thesis.......2006-06-10

In the latter stages of `Orientalism', Edward Said's monumental and controversial treatise on the `otherness' of Eastern cultures as perceived by Western writers and colonial figures, the German anti-Islamist Gustave von Grunbaum - writing some five decades ago - is taken to task. Said notes his `essentially reductive, negative generalisations' about Islam and supplies quotations to substantiate the charge. Despite Said's strictures, though, von Grunebaum's statements concerning the `basic anti-humanism of Islamic civilization' which `does not separate the things of Caesar from those of God' have a definite bearing on one side of the current debate in the light of more recent catastrophic events. This view of Islam as prescriptive, authoritarian, resistant to change is by its nature `Orientalist', in the pejorative sense which Said implies, because it is held by an outsider whose Western intellectual baggage must inevitably compromise any attempt on his part to be objective. Much as I usually defer to Said's prodigious scholarship I find myself in serious disagreement with him here. Likewise, the sequel `Culture and Imperialism' contains a discussion of W.B. Yeats in which Said objects to two American commentators on post '79 Iran quoting Yeats in their reports. He feels that the words of Ireland's greatest poet about `the worst being full of passionate intensity' would be better applied to the Western colonial intervention of 1953 than to those caught up in, or leading, the upheaval which would be its eventual outcome. Of course, many would take the view that Yeats' `Second Coming' could quite legitimately be referred to when the subject of the Ayatollah Khomeini's bloodstained Islamofascist regime is under discussion.

Unfortunately this propensity for denial and omission to some extent pervades `Covering Islam'. Written in the wake of Iran's 1979 `revolution' and the ensuing hostage crisis it deals with Western media perception of Islam and the Islamic world. Essentially what is presented is a further ramification of the argument in `Orientalism', which is referred back to, concerning the problem of negative, sometimes racist, Muslim stereotypes in mainly the US media. `I have no quarrel with the view that the Islamic world is in a dreadful state', Said concedes, acknowledging that at least some of the criticism might be justified. He also admits that most Islamic societies are `poor, tyrannical, militarily inept' and `incompetent, crude dictatorships', although without any attempt to analyse the possible underlying reasons for this. When even a respected authority like Bernard Lewis refers to Islam as something `static, determinist and authoritarian' - as distinct from the rationalist, secular West - he is in effect shouted down, possibly because Said senses in the remark some hint of an explanation which Lewis would like to offer for the inherent backwardness of Islamic countries. John Kifner of the New York Times gets similar treatment for an article in which he contrasts the Western mind - post-Reformation - with Islam, noting that the latter observes no separation of Church and State and remarking on the difficulty we in the West are bound to have in grasping the power exerted by Islam. Again, these seem to me pertinent observations although Said disallows them.

The main focus of the book is Iran and the various references to Khomeini, far from being critical, seem calculated not to offend his supporters whose hysterical adulation was dramatically pointed up at the time by the Western media. Incredibly, as an example of the hostile media slant Said even mentions an edition of Khomeini's `Islamic Government', published under the title `Khomeini's Mein Kampf' and carrying a preface by one George Capozi Jnr of the New York Post which compares Khomeini with Hitler. Given the nature of the regime and the psychology of its leader this would seem fair comment, but Said chooses instead to focus on Khomeini's reputation at home as a great reader of Islamic law who thus, as the nation's guide, fulfils the requirements of Iran's new constitution. His moral teachings are mentioned in passing along with his call for an Islamic republic which should `institutionalize righteousness' and act in the best interests of the oppressed. Sadly, these reassuring indications of the tyrant's honourable intentions merely disguise the brutal reality of a system which claimed many innocent lives. Nor, with the benefit of hindsight, is this regretted in the revised 1991 introduction. We have to look elsewhere to be informed about the regime's routine murder of gays, atheists, apostates, prostitutes and adulterers, not to mention the righteous Mullah's revolting prescriptions regarding bestiality and sex with children.

Said also states, at various points, his opinions on what qualifies anyone to report from Muslim countries or comment from the outside looking in. He regrets the fact that those who express negative opinions about the Islamic world often have no grasp of Islamic jurisprudence and are unfamiliar with the languages of the region. Zionist author Michael Walzer, for example, is referred to in this light. I would not normally defend Walzer (his characterisation of the Palestinian resistance as religious rather than political is patently absurd) but this seems a little unfair. By the same logic it might be argued that, in the `30s and `40s, to have criticised Hitler one should ideally have been a German speaker and possessed an in-depth knowledge of Germany's history and culture, also its legal system.

I have too high a regard for Professor Said to dismiss his thesis out of hand. It is valid up to a point. He is right to condemn the media charade of the hostage crisis following the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, the whole point of which was to force the return of the exiled Shah from the States to face trial. Over the 444-day period of the standoff a cavalcade of network `pundits', with their 3-minute soundbite approach to history, did little to advance public awareness of the background to the crisis. Of the struggle unfolding between the clergy and various political groupings in Iran very little was said. Of course, had there been serious analysis of this and other important issues it would probably have detracted from the entertainment value of the discussions centering upon conspiracy theories rather than facts. Thus, George Ball of the Washington Post's claim that the embassy takeover was `orchestrated by well-known Marxists' (how well known or who they were, exactly, was not specified) typified the general ambience of rumour and paranoia. Other equally informed contributors to the debate alleged PLO involvement and, because the Cold War still had a decade to run, inevitably the Soviet Union must have had a hand in it also. That the Iranian people might actually have suffered under the Pahlavi dynasty and therefore wished to bring its deposed head to account seems scarcely to have been considered. When the crisis was finally resolved rumours of torture and ill-treatment inflicted on the hostages by their captors were shown to have been a cynical lie conceived as part of the media's sensationalist agenda. This attention-grabbing, racist stereotype of the Muslim whose moral backwardness is bound to lead to uncivilized behaviour - played upon at length during the seige - unfortunately continues to have wide currency.

Said also notes hypocrisy in the charge that Islamic societies are theologically backward-looking if it is not equally applied to Israel. The terrorist Begin's citing of Biblical precedent to justify his war on the Palestinians is brought to mind. Indeed, the plethora of pro-Israeli books and journals masquerading as serious scholarship and responsible journalism, in their eagerness to portray Israel as a victim of Islamic violence, say little or nothing about the bombing and invasion of several Islamic countries by Israel and the US, or Palestinian dispossession. This is familiar territory and all of a piece with, elsewhere, Said's excoriating and entirely proper denunciations of Israeli oppression in the occupied territories. Various examples of hate propaganda in American right-wing publications are mentioned, one particularly repellent example being Martin Peretz of the `New Atlantic' who is shown nailing his racist, anti-Arab colours firmly to the mast in a theatre review. Such unpleasant media stereotypes seem to have multiplied following the OPEC price rises of 1974 and the increase in the cost of imported oil. This strand of Said's argument ultimately connects with his analysis, in the concluding chapter, of the corporate or government-driven agenda which dictates the angle of Islamic studies in American universities and the careers open to graduates in the subject area.

In sum, more than twenty-five years after its initial publication `Covering Islam' remains thought-provoking and merits reconsideration in the context of the post 9/11 debate. For the sake of balance, however, I would strongly recommend Muslim apostate scholar Ibn Warraq's rigorous critique of Islam `Why I Am Not A Muslim' as a powerful refutation of Said's assertion in his introduction that the religion is `doctrinally blameless' vis-à-vis the absence of personal freedoms in many Islamic societies. Also, those who might be persuaded of Islam's allegedly benign attitude towards women could do worse than read `Price Of Honour', Jan Goodwin' chilling account of its practical realization in some of these very societies. Of particular relevance to this discussion is her chapter on Iran entitled `There Is No Fun In Islam' - those being the Ayatollah's very words - which shows how the initial euphoria following the Shah's overthrow soon gave way tragically to the realization that one barbaric torture state had been swept away only to be replaced by another.

Contrarian worth reading . . ........2006-06-08

First published in 1981 and updated in 1997, Said's critique of the media's coverage of Islam, particularly in the Middle East, is a thought-provoking challenge to any reader's perceptions of what is reported as news from that war-torn part of the world. Written before 9/11, subsequent military intervention in Afghanistan, and the current conflict in Iraq, the book's interpretation of events unfolding there (the aftermath of the Islamic revolution in Iran) are often prophetic. An understanding of Islam based solely on Western "interest," he argues, will lead to further and protracted conflict rather than resolution of differences.

Despite a carping tone that becomes irritating and a tendency to make its points with a thoroughness that seems like overkill, the book throws a searching light on how Islam is represented by news gatherers, experts, and policy makers. Emphasis on violence, anti-American rhetoric, and resistance to "modernization," for example, belie the fact that there is not a single monolithic Islam but many Islams and that what news organizations perpetuate is an undifferentiated form of cultural stereotyping - as if it were sufficient to say about the Dutch that they all wear wooden shoes.

Said's arguments are dismissed (see other reviews here) for reasons that may have some validity (as a Palestinian-American, his sympathies are clearly not pro-Israeli), but readers can benefit nonetheless from his contrarian views, especially since they throw into question assumptions about the Middle East, which so far show a tendency (as in the case of Iran and Iraq) to seriously misjudge political and cultural realities.

Important points, but..........2006-01-04

In Covering Islam, Edward W. Said makes some vitally important points that remind us that our relationship with many countries (and not just in the countries/cultures/peoples who are Arabic or Islamic or in the Middle East) is informed by a media that does not always do justice to the people they cover -- in many cases, the media generalizes and demonizes. Making one of the most important points in the book, Said reminds us that Islam (like "Christendom" or "the West" or any broad cultural category) is not a monolithic homogeneous structure, but that many journalists, pundits, spokespeople, and citizens see and portray it as such.

Said cites many examples of journalists (and academics) who fall into lazy habits when looking at and writing these cultures. Unfortunately, it seemed to me that Said makes many generalizations himself, about American media and journalists (although, to be fair, he does give some examples in the last chapter of academics and writers who he believes have a more broad and insightful and accurate viewpoint) which made it harder for me to stay engaged with the book.

Finally, I wanted to know his solutions and suggestions, not just the problem. If everything an American journalist or adademic touches in a country such as Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan is tainted by post-colonialism and oil and government, how can the average person learn about that part of the world in a genuine manner? What information is trustworthy? Said has told us the problem, or part of it, but did not seem, in this book anyway, to offer solutions.

Islam covered.......2005-08-19

How Islam is portrayed in the Western media shows how the tail wags the dog - a minority determines how the majority sees the rest of the world by giving them access to selective information about the Other.

This book should be added to your post-9/11-book shelf.

Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World

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Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World
Edward W. Said
Manufacturer: Pantheon Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: B000PEIRHE

The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery
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The Knife Man

fascinating

Very Good Treatment of a Little Known Subject

"He made surgery a science."

Very Good

The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery
Wendy Moore
Manufacturer: Broadway
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Historical | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0767916522
Release Date: 2005-09-13

Book Description

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his gothic horror story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he based the house of the genial doctor-turned-fiend on the home of John Hunter. The choice was understandable, for Hunter was both widely acclaimed and greatly feared.

From humble origins, John Hunter rose to become the most famous anatomist and surgeon of the eighteenth century. In an age when operations were crude, extremely painful, and often fatal, he rejected medieval traditions to forge a revolution in surgery founded on pioneering scientific experiments. Using the knowledge he gained from countless human dissections, Hunter worked to improve medical care for both the poorest and the best-known figures of the era—including Sir Joshua Reynolds and the young Lord Byron.

An insatiable student of all life-forms, Hunter was also an expert naturalist. He kept exotic creatures in his country menagerie and dissected the first animals brought back by Captain Cook from Australia. Ultimately his research led him to expound highly controversial views on the age of the earth, as well as equally heretical beliefs on the origins of life more than sixty years before Darwin published his famous theory.

Although a central figure of the Enlightenment, Hunter’s tireless quest for human corpses immersed him deep in the sinister world of body snatching. He paid exorbitant sums for stolen cadavers and even plotted successfully to steal the body of Charles Byrne, famous in his day as the “Irish giant.”

In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter’s murky and macabre world—a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine.

Customer Reviews:

The Knife Man.......2007-05-13

Fantastic, intriguing, fun to read. Brings a deep respect to our progenitors and how they ever survived those "unapprised " years. It is a great tribute to the great man John Hunter.

fascinating.......2007-02-12

Wendy Moore does an excellent job of bringing John Hunter's life and accomplishments to us in the context in which they occurred. This book is not only a well written biography on a subject deserving of widespread recognition; it also serves as a great historical reference with intersections into minute aspects of the lives of other notables. The horrific conditions under which individuals in the 1700s underwent surgical procedures are elucidated in this work. In a time where there was no standardized process of peer review, the work of this genius was plaigarized by several who attended his anatomy lectures and much of his writing has been lost to us because of the plaigarism of one of his pupils, who eventually burned many of his papers following his death after he had used them as resource material for discoveries he himself claimed to have made. I am glad that this biography has done some justice for a previously obscure figure. That his conclusions about the evolution of species predated Darwin's birth is a testimony to his relentless pursuit of material fact in a climate where disputing biblical accounts of human origins was considered apostate.

Very Good Treatment of a Little Known Subject.......2006-08-22

I generally agree with the other reviewers that this is an outstanding work, made all the more remarkable by the recognition that Hunter has remained so obscure to the general reader over the 200+ years since he lived and worked. Author Moore's writing style is engaging and straightforward, and the book is an easy and enlightening read. But I do have a couple of cavils. First, and even considering our two centuries' remove, there is a discernible remoteness or lack of intimacy in the description of Hunter and his activities, e.g., "he must have thought", "he probably knew", and so forth that is a bit off-putting until the reader is informed near the end of the book that Hunter's spiteful brother-in-law burned most of his papers, including correspondence with prized pupils like Jenner, after Hunter's death, inevitably depriving biographers of enriching details. I believe it would have been helpful if she explained this fact earlier in the work. Second, the book just cries out for illustrations. The sole "portrait" of Hunter is a small, almost cartoonish depiction, and Moore constantly--if inadvertently--teases the reader with references to the superb illustrators who worked for Hunter over the years, but does not include even one of their drawings; very frustrating. With these exceptions, readers who enjoy the work of physician-cum-historian Roy Porter will certainly feel right at home with this very entertaining book.

"He made surgery a science.".......2006-04-24

Wendy Moore's magnificent book, "The Knife Man," is a thoroughly researched account of the life and times of John Hunter, one of the most controversial and fascinating figures of the eighteenth century. Born in 1728 in Scotland, Hunter was the tenth child of humble farming parents. He was an indifferent student who preferred learning through observation and experimentation rather than by reading dusty texts. During his teenage years, John's father and six of his siblings died. This was not surprising during an era when "burials far exceeded baptisms." Matters were not helped by the use of such toxic "remedies" as bloodletting, purging, and blistering to cure the sick. Doctors never washed their hands or sterilized their instruments; if the disease didn't kill the patient, the physician's intervention would probably do the trick.

In 1748, Hunter traveled to London to assist in the anatomy school founded by his brother, William. This revolutionary institution enabled medical students, for the first time in England, to obtain daily hands-on practice in human dissection. This was a financially successful venture for William and it marked the beginning of John Hunter's brilliant career. Until his death in 1793, John worked tirelessly (sleeping, on average, four hours a night) not only as an anatomist, but also as a popular lecturer, surgeon, naturalist, and scientific thinker, whose theories about the origins of life, resuscitation techniques, and surgical practice were nothing short of visionary. One of his main preoccupations was the collection, dissection, and preservation of animals and insects of many different species, which led to the establishment of his own museum of medicine, comparative anatomy, and natural history.

Because of his unorthodox ideas, many of which contradicted accepted religious beliefs and standard medical practice, Hunter garnered his share of enemies along with his many admirers. He was a vivisectionist who experimented on live animals, and although he was never prosecuted for grave robbing, he was certainly guilty of endorsing and exploiting this practice. His colleagues in St. George's Hospital in London also resented Hunter's high-handedness, frank speech, and disregard for convention; they were undoubtedly also jealous of his huge popularity and devoted following among medical students.

In lesser hands, "The Knife Man" could have been a dry account of an individual whose name few people even recognize, but Wendy Moore's accessible and lively prose brings Hunter and his contemporaries to brilliant life. The author captures a time when medicine was, in many ways, still in its infancy, but it was also an era when innovative ideas were beginning to dissipate the cobwebs of the past. Moore's fluid prose reads like thrilling fiction. She takes us along to the graveyard where Resurrection Men, night after night, ruthlessly dig up fresh corpses for dissection. She seats us in the lecture hall as John Hunter enthralls his rapt students with his exhortation to "ask the reason of things" and take nothing for granted. Moore makes us understand Hunter's vision--to teach his acolytes "to subject every common superstition and unproven therapy to scrutiny, to question every step they took."

Among Hunter's estimated one thousand students were future doctors who would become influential figures in nineteenth century teaching hospitals, spreading Hunter's doctrines throughout Europe and the United States. Among his pupils were Edward Jenner, who developed the vaccine against smallpox, and James Parkinson, for whom Parkinson's disease is named. Hunter also served as surgeon extraordinary to King George III, was elected to the Royal Society of Medicine, and treated such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, a young Lord Byron, and Thomas Gainsborough. No more fitting tribute can be given John Hunter than these words of his assistant, William Clift: "He seemed to me to have lived before his time and to have died before he was sufficiently understood." "The Knife Man" is an unforgettable journey that will enthrall anyone who is interested in the history of medicine and the origins of modern surgical practice.

Very Good.......2006-03-05

This is a well written and enlightening biography of the great 18th century British physician-scientist John Hunter. Moore has done a real service by bringing Hunter before the reading public. Known largely to historians of medicine as an important figure in the history of surgery, Moore shows Hunter to be definitely that and much more. Hunter is also a remarkable personal story. An expatriate Scot and son of impoverished parents, largely uninterested in formal education as a youth, Hunter became the outstanding anatomist of his time under the tutelage of his older brother William and by virtue of his great natural talents. Similarly, he had relatively little in the way of formal medical education, though given the primitive state of medical theory and practice in his time, this was arguably an advantage. By the end of his life, he was perhaps the preeminent surgeon in Britain, enjoyed an international reputation as a scientist, and inspired a large number of students to pursue his brand of empirical, more scientifically oriented practice and research. Though Hunter's story is in some respects a lurid one, with the reliance on grave robbers for cadavers and the vicious professional rivalries characterizing some of his career, Moore does very well to show the essential nature of these events without letting them overpower the narrative. The most interesting aspect of the book is actually not Hunter's medical accomplishments, though these were very important, but Moore's description of his other achievements. Moore shows Hunter to be a profoundly important teacher who influenced a whole generation of British and American surgeons and physicians including important individuals like Jenner. Hunter's achievements as a biologist, particularly his work in anatomy, comparative anatomy, and what would become physiology, were substantial. Moore makes the good point that Hunter's achievements may have been unappreciated in part because credit for some of his achievements were attributed to his older brother and after John Hunter's death, appear to have been appropriated by his shameless brother-in-law. Hunter appears also to have been at the center of the British Enlightenment. His friendships included a number of notable British intellectuals like the great naturalist Joseph Banks and he was on good terms with individuals like Gibbon and Adam Smith.
Written in a clear and lively style, this book does an excellent job of describing Hunter's life and major achievements. It also gives a good sense of contemporary medical practice and scientific life. The drawback of this book is that Moore doesn't give much sense of where Hunter fits into contemporary medical, scientific, and intellectual life. Hunter appears to be a major figure of the British Enlightenment, but he is never described as such by Moore. How did Hunter's work compare with developments in the rest of Europe, for example, Paris, where the end of the 18th century would see a revolution in medical education, some of whose features were anticipated by Hunter? How does Hunter, with his skepticism, his continual questioning of authority, and his dedication to experiment, fit into the broad currents of the Enlightenment and specifically within the British Enlightenment? There is an outstanding secondary literature on many of these topics, but Moore does not seem to have used it in her work on Hunter.

Book Description

This volume addresses several key questions regarding primates in fragments. It is divided into sections based on broad categories of research in primates in fragments. In the genetics and population dynamics section, the authors cover topics in viability, metapopulation and species that remain in remnant forests. In the behavioral ecology section, authors take a closer look at feeding, ranging and other behaviors that allow primates to remain in or disperse between fragments. In conservation and management, authors bring knowledge of species who remain in fragments together with plans to implement strategies for their long term viability. Finally, in the integration and future directions section, authors synthesize the information in this volume and make recommendations for future and continued work in this field.

Customer Reviews:

Great addition to conservation biology!.......2003-11-04

I think this is a great new addition not only to the study of primates in critical habitats but for the science of conservation biology. I recommend this book for anyone who is intersted in what is going on the the tropics.

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