02285cam a2200277 i 4500 393579566 TxAuBib 20191002120000.0 160922s2016||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2016299972 9780735220775 hardcover 0735220778 hardcover TxAuBib rda Le Carré, John, 1931- The pigeon tunnel : stories from my life / John Le Carr. New York, New York : Viking, [2016] vii, 310 pages ; 24 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth; visiting Rwanda’s museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Year’s Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-310). 20191002. Le Carré, John, 1931- Novelists, English 20th century Biography.