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Title details for Wild Bill Donovan by Douglas Waller - Available

Wild Bill Donovan

The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage

by Douglas Waller
Johnny Heller
Audiobook
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He was one of America's most exciting and secretive generals—the man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, "Wild Bill" Donovan was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the country's first national intelligence agency) and the father of today's CIA. Donovan introduced the nation to the dark arts of covert warfare on a scale it had never seen before. Now, veteran journalist Douglas Waller has mined government documents and private archives throughout the United States and England, drawn on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and interviewed scores of Donovan's relatives, friends, and associates to produce a riveting biography of one of the most powerful men in modern espionage.


The son of poor Irish Catholic parents, William Joseph Donovan married into Protestant wealth and fought heroically in World War I, where he earned the nickname "Wild Bill" for his intense leadership. After the war he made millions as a lawyer on Wall Street until FDR tapped him to be his strategic intelligence chief. A charismatic leader, Donovan was revered by his secret agents. Yet at times he was reckless, risking his life unnecessarily in war zones and engaging in extramarital affairs that became fodder for his political enemies.


Wild Bill Donovan reads like an action-packed spy thriller, with stories of daring young men and women in Donovan's OSS sneaking behind enemy lines for sabotage, breaking into Washington embassies to steal secrets, plotting to topple Adolf Hitler, and suffering brutal torture or death when they were captured by the Gestapo. It is also a tale of political intrigue, of infighting at the highest levels of government, of powerful men pitted against one another. Deftly separating fact from fiction, Waller investigates the successes and the occasional spectacular failures of Donovan's intelligence career, making for a gripping and revealing portrait of this most controversial spymaster.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 28, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781452621661
      • File size: 424244 KB
      • Duration: 14:43:50

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Those interested in the history of Donovan, the wartime OSS, and the WWII era in general will be drawn to this title, but for anyone else its appeal is uncertain. There's much to be said about Donovan's style of espionage and the story of the postwar birth of the CIA, but this ancestors-to-grave biography dissipates its energies. Furthermore, Johnny Heller doesn't succeed in establishing a thread or an arc for his narration. He is quite effective whenever the action picks up and draws him, and the listener, in. But through the bulk of the text he falls back on the practiced rhythms of the professional narrator, often without regard to syntax and with a monotony that builds in the listener's mind, chapter by chapter. Production values are high here, and this is still a title worth recommending. D.A.W. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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