Ben Macintyre. (2007). Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal. Unabridged Books on Tape.

Ben Macintyre. 2007. Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal. Books on Tape.

Ben Macintyre, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal. Books on Tape, 2007.

Ben Macintyre. Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal. Unabridged Books on Tape, 2007.

OverDrive Product Record

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Agent Zigzag

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Agent Zigzag A True Story of Nazi Espionage Love and Betrayal

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   • fileAs: Macintyre, Ben
   • bioText: Ben Macintyre is writer-at-large and associate editor of the Times of London. He is the author of Agent Zigzag, The Man Who Would Be King, The Englishman’s Daughter, The Napoleon of Crime, and Forgotten Fatherland. He lives in London with his wife, the novelist Kate Muir, and their three children.
     
     JOHN LEE's highly innovative work in the fields of emotional intelligence, anger management, and emotional regression has made him an in-demand consultant, teacher, trainer, coach, and speaker. His contributions in the fields of recovery, relationships, men’s issues, spirituality, parenting, and creativity have put him in the national spotlight for over 20 years. Lee has been featured on Oprah, 20/20, Barbara Walters’ The View, CNN, PBS, and NPR. He has been interviewed by Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and dozens of other national magazines and radio talk shows.For over 25 years, Lee has conducted private and group sessions on a variety of issues working with men, women, couples, and families. He lectures, gives workshops and trainings in cities all over the world, delivering sensitive, yet sophisticated material to audiences in a humorous and simple way everyone can understand. His lectures have been branded as “hilariously entertaining, deeply compassionate, yet filled with ‘tell it like it is!’”Lee served as a professor at the University of Texas and at the University of Alabama before becoming a writer, bestselling author, life coach, and personal consultant. He currently resides on breathtaking Lookout Mountain in Mentone, Alabama with his three happy dogs.
   • name: Ben Macintyre
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   • name: John Lee

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title

Agent Zigzag

fullDescription

Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began.
In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman was orders orders from the Abwehr to blow up an airplane factory in Britain. Instead, he contacted MI5, the British Secret Service. For the next four years, Chapman worked as a double agent, a lone British spy at the heart of the German Secret Service. Crisscrossing Europe under different names, all the while weaving plans, spreading disinformation, and, miraculously, keeping his stories straight under intense interrogation, he even managed to gain some profit and seduce beautiful women along the way.
The Nazis feted Chapman as a hero and awarded him the Iron Cross. In Britain, he was pardoned for his crimes, becoming the only wartime agent to be thus rewarded. Sixty years after the end of the war, and ten years after Chapman’s death, MI5 has now declassified all of Chapman’s files, releasing more than 1,800 pages of top secret material and allowing the full story of Agent Zigzag to be told for the first time.

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1. • value: Grade 9
2. • value: Grade 10
3. • value: Grade 11
4. • value: Grade 12

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: New York Times Book Review
   • content:

     "Macintyre is the more graceful writer; Agent Zigzag has a clarity and shape that make it the more fluid account... I would give a personal nod to Macintyre's as the better book... A review cannot possibly convey the sheer fun of this story... or the fascinating moral complexities."

2. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times
   • content: "[Agent Zigzag's] incredible wartime adventures, recounted in Ben Macintyre's rollicking, spellbinding Agent Zigzag blend the spy-versus-spy machinations of John le Carré with the high farce of Evelyn Waugh."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Washington Post Book World
   • content: "Chapman's story has been told in fragments in the past, but only when MI5 declassified his files was it possible to present it in all its richness and complexity. Macintyre tells it to perfection, with endless insights into the horror and absurdity of war....Eddie Chapman was a patriot, in his fashion, and this excellent book finally does him justice."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Washington Times
   • content: "Fact sounds like fast-moving fiction in this espionage saga of a man who was probably the most improbable double agent to emerge in World War II. ... The author has written an enormously fascinating book about an enormously fascinating man. The late Eddie Chapman would have been delighted to at last capture the limelight denied him by the restrictions of his wartime profession. The question now is, who will make the movie and who will play the lead? Too bad Errol Flynn is dead."
5. • premium: False
   • source: The Boston Globe
   • content: "[R]ichly descriptive, marvelously illuminating, and just plain brilliant....One could not think of a better subject for Macintyre's curious mind than the man whom British intelligence dubbed Agent Zigzag in December 1942.... [A] plot - impossible and pointless to summarize - that is as briskly paced and suspenseful as any novel's. Macintyre's diligent research and access to once-secret files combine here with his gift of empathetic imagination and inspired re-creation. He writes with brio and a festive spirit and has quite simply created a masterpiece."
6. • premium: False
   • source: John le Carré
   • content: "Superb. Meticulously researched, splendidly told, immensely entertaining and often very moving."
7. • premium: False
   • source: )
     
   • content: "Macintyre [relates] his compellingly cinematic spy thriller with verve."
     --Entertainment Weekly (an "EW Pick"
8. • premium: False
   • source: Men's Journal
   • content: "A portrait of a man who double-crossed not only the Nazis, but just about every other principle and person he encountered. In doing so, Eddie Chapman made all thriller writers' jobs harder, because this spy tale trumps any fiction."
9. • premium: False
   • source: William Boyd, The Sunday Telegraph
   • content: "One of the most extraordinary stories of the Second World War."
10. • premium: False
    • source: The Mail on Sunday
    • content: "This is the most amazing book, full of fascinating and hair-raising true-life adventures...and beautifully told. For anyone interested in the Second World War, spying, romance, skullduggery or the hidden chambers of the human mind, it would be impossible to recommend it too highly."
11. • premium: False
    • source: The Daily Express
    • content: "Speaking as a former MI6 officer, take it from me: there are very few books which give you a genuine picture of what it feels like to be a spy. This is one.... an enthralling war story."
12. • premium: False
    • source: The [London] Observer
    • content: "Macintyre tells Chapman's tale in a perfect pitch: with the Boys' Own thrills of Rider Haggard, the verve of George MacDonald Fraser and Carl Hiassen's mordant humor. . . . Hugely entertaining."
13. • premium: False
    • source: The Spectator
    • content: "If Ben Macintyre had presented this story as a novel, it would have been denounced as far too unlikely: yet every word of it is true. Moreover he has that enviable gift, the inability to write a dull sentence. An enthralling book results from the opening up of once deadly secret files."
14. • premium: False
    • source: Max Hastings, The [London] Sunday Times
    • content: "Splendidly vivid. . . . There are endless delightful twists to the tale."
15. • premium: False
    • source: Time Out
    • content: "Ben Macintyre's rollicking, thriller-paced account...is a Boy's Own adventure par excellence and a gripping psychological case study of a man 'torn between patriotism and egotism.'"
16. • premium: False
    • source: The Times
    • content: "Macintyre succeeds in bringing Chapman vividly to life. It is unlikely that a more engaging study of espionage and deception will be published this year."
17. • premium: False
    • source: working concurrently for Britain's MI5 and the Nazi's Abwehr.
    • content: "A preternaturally talented liar and pretty good safecracker becomes a "spy prodigy"
18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content: If someone at British Intelligence wrote a spy novel, it wouldn't be any more convoluted, brimming with intrigue, or shocking than this true account of Edward Chapman, one of WWII's most colorful spies. John Lee's voice is appropriately smooth or smarmy, upper crust or lower class as he presents Chapman, the small-time crook, escaped convict, and wily con artist trained by the German Secret Service for sabotage against Britain. Instead, Chapman becomes an effective double agent, leaking disinformation to Germany and supplying Britain with valuable intelligence. Lee brings listeners a Chapman who "out-Bonds" Bond. He loves beautiful women, luxury, and his country. As Chapman handles his German spymasters and the British, who call him "Agent Zigzag," Lee displays a biting sense of the ironic. Fascinating listening. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
19. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      July 30, 2007
      London Times
      associate editor Macintyre (The Man Who Would Be King
      ) adroitly dissects the enigmatic World War II British double agent Eddie Chapman in this intriguing and balanced biography. Giving “little thought” to the morality of his decision, Chapman offered to work as a spy for the Germans in 1940 after his release from an English prison in the Channel Islands, then occupied by the Germans. After undergoing German military intelligence training, Chapman parachuted into England in December 1942 with instructions to sabotage a De Havilland aircraft factory, but he surrendered after landing safely. Doubled by MI5 (the security service responsible for counterespionage), Chapman was used “to feed vital disinformation to the enemy” and was one of the few double agents “to delude their German handlers until the end of the war.” Meticulously researched—relying extensively on recently released wartime files of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service—Macintyre's biography often reads like a spy thriller. In the end, the author concludes that Chapman “repeatedly risked his life... provided invaluable intelligence,” but “it was never clear whether he was on the side of the angels or the devils.” Of the two Zigzag biographies this fall (the other, by Nicholas Booth, is reviewed below), this is clearly superior.

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Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began.
In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman was orders orders from the Abwehr to blow up an airplane factory in Britain. Instead, he contacted MI5, the British Secret Service. For the next four years, Chapman worked as a double agent, a lone British spy at the heart of the German Secret Service. Crisscrossing Europe under different names, all the while weaving plans, spreading disinformation, and, miraculously, keeping his stories straight under intense interrogation, he even managed to gain some profit and seduce beautiful women along the way.
The Nazis feted Chapman as a hero and awarded him the Iron Cross. In Britain, he...

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Agent Zigzag A True Story of Nazi Espionage Love and Betrayal

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A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

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   • description: History / Wars & Conflicts / World War II / General
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