The Secrets We Kept Download

ISBN: B07V9Z5DPS
Title: The Secrets We Kept Pdf A Novel

"This month for Reese's Book Club, we are listening to The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott! Set during the Cold War, it tells the story of secretaries turned spies who are tasked with smuggling Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR and into the hands of Russian citizens. You'll get to know Sally and Irina, two spies who risk it all for love and adventure." (Reese Witherspoon)

A thrilling tale of secretaries turned spies, of love and duty, and of sacrifice - inspired by the true story of the CIA plot to infiltrate the hearts and minds of Soviet Russia, not with propaganda, but with the greatest love story of the 20th century: Doctor Zhivago.

At the height of the Cold War, two secretaries are pulled out of the typing pool at the CIA and given the assignment of a lifetime. Their mission: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR, where no one dares publish it, and help Pasternak's magnum opus make its way into print around the world. Glamorous and sophisticated Sally Forrester is a seasoned spy who has honed her gift for deceit all over the world - using her magnetism and charm to pry secrets out of powerful men. Irina is a complete novice, and under Sally's tutelage quickly learns how to blend in, make drops, and invisibly ferry classified documents. 

The Secrets We Kept combines a legendary literary love story - the decades-long affair between Pasternak and his mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, who was sent to the Gulag and inspired Zhivago's heroine, Lara - with a narrative about two women empowered to lead lives of extraordinary intrigue and risk. From Pasternak's country estate outside Moscow to the brutalities of the Gulag, from Washington, DC to Paris and Milan, The Secrets We Kept captures a watershed moment in the history of literature - told with soaring emotional intensity and captivating historical detail. And at the center of this unforgettable debut is the powerful belief that a piece of art can change the world.

This audiobook features performances by Mozhan Marno as Olga, Carlotta Brentan as Irina, Cynthia Farrell as Sally, Saskia Maarleveld as The Typists, Jonathan Davis as Boris, David Pittu as Sergio, and James Fouhey as Teddy.

War of the words I predict that Lara Prescott’s debut novel will be a smash hit. From the first sentence, at “The Agency” in D.C. in the 1950s, with the clack of the typewriter keys, the typing pool women engage us. The Agency goals are to spin subversive words into gold to spread democratic ideals. That is where the role of Dr. Zhivago comes in, a book banned in the Eastern Bloc for its critiques of the State. Intellectuals, scholars, artists and writers and were used as propaganda tools to disseminate the ideology of the West to places behind the Iron Curtain in the East.Prescott demonstrates the role of women to advance this objective, giving us an absorbing, scintillating, and exceptionally well-paced page-turner that will have you canceling dates and burning dinner to keep reading.During the ten or so years that Pasternak was writing his masterpiece, word had come to the attention of the cultural heads of State that the content may contradict their dogma. Boris’ lover, Olga, was Pasternak’s muse for the character of Lara, Dr. Zhivago’s love interest. She had already gone to the gulag once, so that the State could tap her for information on Pasternak’s “heretical” novel-in-progress.The narrative alternates between East and West--Olga and Boris in the East, and the typing pool women in the West. Among the women in D.C., the focus is on Irina and Sally, two very different women who become more than just typists. You can use Swallow or Carrier to describe them—women who are talented at getting info from loose-lipped men that possess important information (Swallow), or who are trained and clever at dropping envelopes of top secret information to their appointed recipients.Whether you are familiar (or uninformed) with Dr. Zhivago, the Cold War, or the 1950s, it won’t matter. Prescott shines in installing the reader instantly and sustaining our interest. The words flow with the urgent but descriptive narrative, and the momentum is both fierce and sinuous. The women often work as “doubles” to obtain information. “A double is a bit of a misnomer; one person doesn’t become two. Rather, one loses a part of herself in order to exist in two worlds, never fully existing in either.”Well, I can tell you, the only world I existed in for the time I was reading this novel was Prescott’s narrative creation. There isn’t one false word or boring passage. I was gripped from the opening page to the hypnotic end. And, still, I can’t get these women out of my head.Based on an exciting true story and well-written, but didn't grab me At the height of the Cold War, the CIA publishes Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago in Russian and smuggles the copies behind the Iron Curtain to embarrass the Soviet leadership. It's a great story filled with colorful characters, intrigue, suspense and literary values.But it's been told before, in Peter Finn and Petra Couvée's "The Zhivago Affair," among other places, and better. There are memoirs and accounts from many of the participants. This fictionalization is a less compelling story than the truth.The author's main interest does not seem to be the plot. Rather she attempts to recreate an historical era with emphasis on sexism. The important characters are all women, mostly fictional, more concerned with love, sex (straight and lesbian), clothes and personal relations than either literature or politics.My issue here is the author does not understand the era. She transplants 21st ideas of sexism into the 1950s. Women of that era did not graduate college only to be shocked at being offered jobs as typists, while less-intelligent college graduate men were put on executive paths. The women and everyone else knew long before college that women's choices were marriage-and-family, low-paid work or fighting hard against steep odds for professional careers. Moreover the women involved did not differ from their male bosses only by sex, the author is comparing middle-class and poor women from average colleges to wealthy Ivy-League males with strong connections. The class differences mattered as well as sex.Contemporary works like Patricia Highsmith's "The Price of Salt," which has some similarities to this novel, paint a far different and more accurate picture of the lives of women and lesbians in the 1950s (that book also ranks much higher on literary grounds). You can also learn from the Zhivago affair books written by participants.Finally the book fails as a thriller. The only real tension concerns Soviet government abuse of Pasternak's mistress, and it is not sustained. The gulag scenes are wrenching, but have been done much better elsewhere. The plotting is not taut, and the action scenes are clumsy.The best way to view this book is as a reasonably well-written attempt to use historical events to illustrate 21st century ideas about women, sex and power. If it had been complete fiction, or if it recounted obscure events, I might have given it three stars for a decent story and good writing. But since it relies mainly on the interest of the historical story, and it doesn't do that story justice, and it fails to evoke the reality of the era, I decided on two stars.

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