Book reviews: 'The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century' by Tim Weiner and 'The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon' by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

'The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century' by Tim Weiner

"Nobody has unlocked more CIA secrets than Tim Weiner," said Kevin Canfield in The Minnesota Star Tribune. The long-time national security correspondent won a National Book Award for 2007's Legacy of Ashes, "a vital text" that dissected the agency's first half-century. Now comes the sequel, "an absorbing portrait of an embattled organization that is facing formidable challenges." Picking up where Ashes left off, The Mission covers a bumpy stretch that includes the 9/11 attacks, the agency's resort to torture, and the false CIA assessments that justified the disastrous U.S. war in Iraq. Weiner's accounts "add fascinating details to what we know about the CIA's role in those events." But he's mindful of the agency's triumphs and details several of those, including its scotching of a Pakistani physicist's rogue efforts to disseminate nuclear weapons technology.

"The story of the CIA that Weiner tells closely resembles the one he told in Legacy of Ashes," said Keith Gessen in The New Yorker. At the start of both the Cold War and the War on Terror, the CIA's importance spiked because information on the enemy was critical, and both conflicts grew into global adventures that greatly expanded the CIA's portfolio. Prior to 9/11, with the Soviet threat gone, the agency had been adrift. After 9/11, it embraced its new mission so fervently that it wrongly declared Iraq in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Maybe the truth wouldn't have swayed the Bush White House anyway. As one former CIA Iraq operations chief told Weiner, "These guys would have gone to war if Saddam had a rubber band and a paper clip." The CIA also helped President Obama expand overseas drone strikes, but its image shifted when Donald Trump took office in 2017 and several former agency officials went public with concerns that he was a national security threat. "Were CIA agents now the good guys?"

Weiner would never suggest as much, said Scott Anderson in The New York Times. Besides showing that the politicization of the CIA is only accelerating, he reports that nearly every director leaves the agency worse off than it was. The organization we come to know in The Mission is "repeatedly blinded by its sense of American supremacy," making mistake after mistake. Weiner doesn't present his mountain of material in the clearest form, making "scant" effort to shape his narrative as names and situations pile up. "Still, there is something simultaneously illuminating and saddening in contemplating the course the CIA has traveled," because its deterioration is evident. In light of the way current CIA director John Ratcliffe backed Trump's unprovoked recent bombing of Iran, "Weiner's warnings about the peril facing both the CIA and the U.S. seem prophetic."

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'The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon' by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Laurie Gwen Shapiro's new Amelia Earhart book "reveals what other biographers missed," said David Kindy in The Washington Post. "In a propulsive narrative peppered with intoxicating details," the author foregrounds Earhart's marriage to publishing heir George Putnam, because Putnam was a shameless huckster who pushed the inexperienced aviator into the spotlight and eventually into risking and losing her life in an attempt to fly around the world. Make no mistake: Earhart herself was a strong-willed adventurer "determined to soar into history." But her demise was the product of a partnership with Putnam, and Shapiro's account "exposes all sides of their interlocking personalities, virtues, and failings."

"The Aviator and the Showman is a lavish, layered narrative," said Hamilton Cain in the Los Angeles Times. When Earhart and The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon by Laurie Gwen Shapiro (Viking, $35) Putnam met, she was a 30-year-old social worker who flew on the side; he was a 40-year-old married junior partner in the family business who had just scored a mammoth hit with Charles Lindbergh's memoir. Within a year, Putnam had won her a seat on a transatlantic flight and arranged a ghostwritten memoir about the trip that made her a celebrity. From there, Shapiro "dexterously untangles the Gordian knot of their entwined passions." As publishing was evolving into a business of blockbusters, Putnam "mastered the moment" and simultaneously "stamped Amelia's imprimatur onto American womanhood," making her an enduring role model.

Shapiro insists that Earhart had flaws, over-confidence among them, said Marion Winik in The Boston Globe. Yet "Amelia's feminism and progressive politics come through loud and clear." She's "well worth getting to know," and her 1937 disappearance, at age 39, is "less of a mystery once you have." Shapiro's writing can be "distractingly quirky," full of speculations about her subjects' moods, but she appears justified in suggesting that Putnam put money concerns above his wife's safety when he pushed her to undertake her final flight before she was ready. Earhart, at least, didn't seem to fear death. As she once quipped, "Who wants to be 80 and have hardened arteries?"