The pigeon tunnel stories from my life
From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times....
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York, New York :
Viking,
[2016]
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| Subjects: | |
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| Summary: | From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth; visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Year's Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. |
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| Physical Description: | vii, 310 pages ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-310). |
| ISBN: | 9780735220775 (hardcover) 0735220778 (hardcover) |
| Author Notes: | He writes espionage thrillers under the pseudonym John le Carré. The pseudonym was necessary when he began writing, in the early 1960s because, at that time, he held a diplomatic position with the British Foreign Office and was not allowed to publish under his own name. When his third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a worldwide bestseller in 1964, he left the foreign service to write full time. His other works include Call for the Dead; A Murder of Quality; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People. He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1986 and the Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association in 1988. In 2011 he accepted the Goethe Medal. And in 2020, he accepted the Olof Palme Prize. Ten of his books have been adapted for television and motion pictures including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Russia House, The Constant Gardener, A Most Wanted Man, and Our Kind of Traitor. Le Carré's memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life, became a New York Times bestseller in 2016. In 2019, he published a spy thriller, Agent Running in the Field. John Le Carré died on December 12, 2020 from pneumonia at the age of 89. (Bowker Author Biography) |
