A society which employs Certified Public Accountants presupposes that people will be able to keep track of certain things, certainly money, for sure, and who people are, though this book finds a certain glory in how easy it is to fool official guardians of the identity assumptions with simple tricks. Obviously, this works best at places like Numec, a company specializing in reprocessing nuclear waste, in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Anybody ought to be able to figure out how likely it is that the following events, prior to December 1982, but reported as background information, might have actually occurred:

His two companions were described on their cards as scientists from `The Department of Electronics, University of Tel Aviv, Israel'.
There was no such department.
The men were LAKAM security officers whose task would be to see the best way of stealing fissionable waste from Numec. All three spent four days in Apollo, passing many hours touring the Numec plant, sitting for more hours in Shapiro's office. What they spoke about would remain a secret. On the fifth day Eitan and his companions left Apollo as unobstrusively as they had arrived.
A month later the first of nine shipments of containers of nuclear waste left Numec. Each container would bear the words: `Property of the State of Israel: Ministry of Agriculture'. The containers would carry a stencil stating they had full diplomatic clearance and so were exempt from customs checks before they were stowed on board El Al cargo freighters to Tel Aviv.
The containers were destined for Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility in the Negev Desert. (pp. 55-56)

One way to be a Mogul, buying companies close to bankruptcy and investing enough to turn them into successes, is described in this book as just the starting point for how "Robert Maxwell was the Barnum and Bailey of the financial world, the great stock market ringmaster able to introduce with consummate speed and a crack of his whip some new and even more startling financial act. But increasingly his high-wire actions had become more dangerous - and long ago he had abandoned any idea of a safety net." (p. 34). Maxwell's arrangements with Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the Soviet KGB, who had been involved in the August plot to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from office, made certain bankers insecure enough to want Maxwell to pay some of their loans. Maxwell thought 400 million pounds might be enough "to stave off his more pressing creditors. He asked Mossad to use its influence with Israel's banker's to arrange a loan. He was told to try to do what his fellow tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, had done when he had faced a similar situation. Murdoch had confessed his plight to his bankers and then renegotiated his debts, which were almost twice what Maxwell owed." (pp. 13-14). Actually, Maxwell must have owed far more than he told the Mossad. A Daily Mirror headline in the photographs section, after the "Maxwell Dies at Sea" picture, reported, "Maxwell: 536m pounds is missing from his firms/ The increasingly desperate actions of a desperate man."

Assuming that much, the rest of the book is written around questions raised by Efraim.

`If the truth about Robert Maxwell surfaces and he is destroyed in the process, who else will be compromised? How great will the damage be to Israel?' (p. 15).

Americans might be interested in this book for judging the current chances for success of American policies that seem to parallel the desperation of Robert Maxwell, but might cause Bill Casey even greater pain, if he were still in charge.

This book is anything but boring--calling this book boring strikes me as a desperate subterfuge by someone who want to keep its explosive contents from fuller circulation. This book is *fascinating* and explosive, not least because of the very well documented coverage it provides of how Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, used Robert Maxwell to penetrate not just the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice, the military, and the national laboratories, but many foreign governments including the Chinese, Canadians, Australians, and many others, with substantial penetration of their intelligence service databases, all through his sale of a software called PROMIS that had a back door enabling the Mossad to access everything it touched (in simplistic terms).

Also shocking, at least to me, was the extensive detail in this book about how the Israeli intelligence service is able to mobilize Jews everywhere as "sayanim," volunteer helpers who carry out operational (that is to say, clandestine) support tasks to include spying on their government and business employers, stealing documents, operating safehouses, making pretext calls, and so on. I am a simple person: if you are a Jew and a US citizen, and you do this for the Israeli intelligence service, then you are a traitor, plain and simple. This practice is evidently world-wide, but especially strong in the US and the UK.

The book draws heavily on just a couple of former Israeli intelligence specialists to address Israeli use of assassination as a normal technique (and implicitly raises the possibility that it was used against Senator John Tower, who died in small airplane crash and was the primary "agent" for Maxwell and Israel in getting PROMIS installed for millions of dollars in fees all over the US Government).

Finally, the book has a great deal of detail about the interplay between governments, crime families, Goldman Sachs and other major investors, and independent operators like Robert Maxwell who play fast and loose with their employee pension funds.

This book is not boring. Far from it. It is shocking, and if it is only half-right and half-accurate, that is more than enough to warrant its being read by every American, whatever their faith.

The only false note here comes from the passages of Elizabeth's supposed son by Dudley, Arthur. There has been exploration and speculation regarding any illegitimate children the Queen may have had, so the idea of Arthur as her son allows a suspension of disbelief. However, the passages with Arthur as narrator are extremely dull and quite pointless. After the first few, I skipped over them entirely, and found that they were recapped almost in their entirety in the following chapters.

While "The Queen's Bastard" is a great read, and the subject has a distinct air of possibility, it is too long by almost 100 pages. Those pages from Arthur's journal are just unnecessary. Nevertheless, I did enjoy reading this novel, and am currently reading the concluding book in Maxwell's trilogy "Virgin." I heartily recommend this novel, but do take it with a grain of salt.

The movie Elizabeth has done a great service for historians, novelists and screenwriters by liberating them from the strict interpretation of Elizabeth as the "Virgin Queen." Elizabeth from all accounts was sexually active throughout her adult life and the persona of the "Virgin Queen" was never more than political and religious façade. The "Virgin Queen" myth has kept centuries of British historians from even considering the possibility that Elizabeth had children. This self-imposed censoring existed despite the fact that there are written suggestions that Elizabeth had more than one child, and several people of Elizabeth's era were whipped or imprisoned for even mentioning the thought.

In The Queen's Bastard, the author begins with the historical facts that there was a person named Arthur Dudley who claimed to be the son of Leicester and Queen Elizabeth and was imprisoned by Spain's King Philip. She then creates a dramatic fiction that chronicles the birth and upbringing of the young man and his adventures in Europe and in Spain. It is a fast moving, totally plausible story. It chronicles the period and creates plausible characters, whose motives are based on their Elizabethan sense of the world. The plot has enough duels, intrigue and amorous adventures to keep fourteen Three Musketeers and twelve Don Juan's happy. A great read, that will make a great movie.

p. s. If you didn't read Robin Maxwell's other book The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, I would go back and read this also. It is one of the most fascinating psychological dramas as the young flirtatious Anne turns into the dominant Queen and then to the betrayed wife headed for beheading. No biographer has caught the personality of Anne Boleyn better than this book.