Harlot's Ghost

Product Information

His story focuses on Harry Hubbard, a Yale-educated Jew inducted into the CIA by spymaster William King Harvey (the “Harlot” of the title), an amoral, alcohol-sodden mentor who teaches Hubbard to leave his scruples behind. Still, it shows how ambiguity affects and infects those who seek to serve what Montague at one point characterises as "the mind of America". This book forever changed my mind on who killed Kennedy, along with Mark Lanes book Plausible Denial. One of the Big White Daddy of American fiction's panoramic, brick-sized novels, Harlot's Ghost is the story of the CIA from 1955-1963, as lived by one of its operatives, Harry Hubard, in the shadow of other key figures in the agency, especially his father, Cal Hubbard and Hugh Montague, the latter known as Harlot.

Hugh Tremont Montague - code name HARLOT - is one of the grand old men of the CIA, a man obsessed and nearly - but not quite - the WASP patrician he seems to be. Mailer was accused of trying to make out he was tougher than he was during his earlier writing but there's none of that here. The Pentacle, if you will, of the US domestic politicians - particularly the White House, the two post-war institutional giants - the FBI and the CIA, enormously powerful mafia that controlled a large part of the profitable economy and international players including those sponsored by the USSR, were in a complex and continuously moving tango where no one was anyone's permanent friend nor a forever enemy.Between missions, Hubbard struggles with his strained marriage to a well-connected WASP, an affair with a gangster’s moll who’s also sleeping with John F. Both books cover the same territory, share many of the same characters, and are as large as well-fed babies. But at the time I thought it was awesome, and I was gratified that Salman Rushdie seemed of all reviewers to *get* the novel: His NYTimes review raved about all the best aspects of the book while acknowledging the weak bits. Old Snowman may be the ghost of Bartlett’s Island, but we have another on Doane, and he is not so agreeable. The trio -- all New England blue bloods -- comprises Hugh Tremont Montague, an urbane, icily fascinating, lethal top-level C.

We start at the end, which in this case is 1983, and Harry is driving back from a tryst with his mistress. In short, read this book if you are really interested in the feel of what it might be like to be in the CIA, but read it in full light of the fact that it was written by a man with an ego of monumental proportions, that it is entirely TOO LONG, and that it needed to be edited by a woman.The ghosts of these Indians may no longer pass through our woods, but something of their old sorrows and pleasures joins the air. It is the only true fjord on the Atlantic coast of North America, yet it is but a part of our rock-hewn splendor. The epistolary bits where Harry hits on his mentor's wife Kittredge through long unremarkable letters were tough to get through. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

They are apricot, then lavender, and pale green, yet in late afternoon they become purple over the whole, a dark royal violet is the color of the twilight shore seen from the sea.Even guidebooks for tourists seek to describe this virtue: “The island of Mount Desert, fifteen miles in diameter, rises like a fabled city from the sea. I am Mailer fan anyway and this is definitely a Mailer book, so if you like his writing, you will love this. If this was the book that The Good Shepard was channeling, I must say the movie was a pale imitation.

The author spends little time in filtering to what he really needed to say, and as a result, the book is at least twice as big as it should have been. For Hubbard, Harlot and their colleagues, intelligence becomes something akin to a religion; personal loyalty, morality, ideology and even patriotism become sublimated to the Mission.The old fisherman, Snowman Dyer, was intrigued so much by Sophocles’ words in literal translation that he attempted to read the original Greek. Such studies may have lacked the zest of tradecraft, but they managed to convince me that any mischief we could work on our evil opponent left us clearly on the right side. Down the Penobscot River they would travel to Blue Hill Bay on the western side of Mount Desert where my family’s house, built in part by my great-great-grandfather, Doane Hadlock Hubbard, still stands. Narrated by Harry Hubbard, a second-generation CIA man, HARLOT'S GHOST looks into the depths of the American soul and the soul of Hugh Tremont Montague, code name Harlot, a CIA man obsessed. But ignore all the flaws (especially that last, which I'd argue isn't genuinely meant as a "To Be Continued"; more it is that Mailer recognizes that the story of the CIA cannot be finished, that this is an ongoing story that still affects the lives of everyone, and that any ending is a lie).