Rating: 
Summary: Better than expected
Review: A little slow in the beginning, the book really takes off.
I expected it to be another spin on tom Clancy tpye gendre, but found I hate to put it down.
Rating:
Summary: A historical spy thriller that hits the mark
Review: If you enjoy spy thrillers, you will not be able to put this book down. The book paints a detailed picture of the clandestine agency starting just after the Second World War and moving forward in time. I particularly enjoyed the interlacing of historically acurate events with thrilling fictonal adventure.If you miss the days of the good Cold War spy stories, pick (or, since it has 892 pages, heft) this book up. On par with the works of Le Carre, Richard Condon or Ludlum.
Rating:
Summary: Destined to be a classic of the Cold War spy genre
Review: I must admit that I had never hear of Littell until I saw this book at the local bookstore. I have always been a Cold War genre fan and so I picked it up. I need only say that, having just finished this book, it will probably become a classic. Both in scope and detail, this book encapsulates an entire era. "The Company" is told with obvious insider knowledge of the workings and history of the CIA as well as keeping a fast-paced, engaging dialogue. There is also an honesty to this book about the workings of the agency of the past 60 years. It doesn't shy away from the failures of the CIA. However, it also gives pretty convincing ideas about why the Company has had failures (Bay of Pigs, Hungary, etc.) by introducing the idea of a high level American spy who leaks the secrets of these actions to his KGB handler. Just finding out who this character is (code name SASHA) makes the book a great read.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book, Great Story, But Count the Typos!
Review: This book was one great read, and my only wish was that it was longer. Littell tells a good tale, although many of his characters are lacking in much personality; they're by and large props for relating the storyline. But in the end, that doesn't detract from the tale told. What is detracting---and downright embarrassing for a publishing house, I should think---is the sheer number of typos! They're everywhere! Sometimes they're just obvious little typos, but at other points they change the sense of a sentence and leave you questioning what was meant to be said. I have never read a book with so many typos. It's certainly discredit to the author of such a fine book.
Rating: 
Summary: If it is Worth Doing
Review: This thinly veiled history of the Central Intelligence Agency - "The Company" to the cognoscenti - left me thinking about a maxim I had previously accepted without reservation. Using a mixture of historic and fictional characters, the author, Robert Littell, portrays an organization that is as busy fighting itself as its cold war enemy, the Soviet Union. Using the cold war backdrops of 1950s Berlin, 1956 Invasion of Hungry, the Bay of Pigs, 1980s Afghanistan and Gorbachev's overthrow, he spins a tale of Alice in Wonderland espionage, a story of people living double lives in their pursuit of a crafty, resourceful, amoral, elusive and formidable enemy. At one point early in the book, Jack McAuliffe, tells his companion that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. This book lays the groundwork for such a premise, but even after 894 pages of justification, I am not sure I question this unconventional wisdom.
Rating:
Summary: Not the Knowing but the Telling
Review: for someone accustomed to reading ludlum, littell's book is a very pleasant turn. it weaves a complex and compelling history of the cia as told through three generations of american and russian spies. as compared to ludlum, littell's characters are motivated by a patriotism that goes beyond the sometimes cynical and self-serving desire to be at peace with a lover and family. litell's characters are made of sterner stuff. if you've read ludlum, never once does one imagine that a son would want to follow his father into the spy business, but littell's families follow just as surely as there are army brats, there are real spy kids. in evaluating the value of reading 900 page spy books, you have to deal with 'truth' on many levels. there is nothing quite as arrogant as the intellect of someone whose knowledge approaches comprehensiveness, and no simple way to step into the conversations of such people without a great amount of preparation. for this reason it is almost impossible to inject the form of the spy novel with much more accuracy or detail than littell provides. it seems to me that you have a fundamental constraint: (dramatic value, historical accuracy, compelling characters, <1000 pages) pick three. i find it difficult to take more seriously the criticism of those people who populate the real intelligence services: their dilemma is that what's true is more exciting than fiction, but it cannot be told. who then could ever be satisfied by such stories? we in the credulous public. but since most everything in the real intelligence business is compartmentalized, the credulous public amounts to all of us. in light of the fact of 9/11 and that some of the greatest spies were american traitors we must simply conclude that *anything* is possible. so satisfy yourself by accepting that any of the scenarios here are plausible, what's true will be denied, what's false will be amplified to throw everyone off the trail. all the non-fiction is vetted anyway. so if you can swallow these kinds of books whole, that's the best thing to do. and in that regard what is most lovely about littell is his feeling for the sense of integrity these extraordinary people must carry with them to the grave. deception is an exceptionally difficult discipline to carry out for years, and one stands in awe of the kind of duplicity these spies accomplish. unless you are willing to dismiss patriotism outright, as ludlum does, you cannot do much better than littell. the alternative is to make heroes out of drug kingpins and other untouchable multinational machers like marc rich. i know just little enough about characters like philby and angleton to be entertained by their fictionalized duet in this book. i knew nothing at all about the failure of the hungarian magyars and found myself swept up by that story. i knew enough about the bay of pigs and kennedy administration to feel the biases of the writer tweaking the story. but it is not the knowing, but the telling that makes this book so worthwhile. in every respect, littell does an admirable job. there is a palpable impolitic bonhomie among his characters that makes the gentle reader envious of dangerous work. there is the home wrecking professionalism that repulses the gentle reader. this is precisely the dramatic balance which gives the best mystery writing its longevity, and the spy business will continue to deliver the greatest mysteries for many years to come. as long as littell continues with this level of storytelling, we gentle readers will have much entertainment to anticipate.
Rating:
Summary: WOW!
Review: This is one of the best novels I have ever read. I wished it were longer. I have no idea how long it took Mr. Littell to write this book, but it must have been a mammoth undertaking.
In my opinion, anyone who claims that this book was dry, boring, or otherwise sophomoric is likely an aspiring critic, and feels he must prove to the world that he knows something the rest of us do not.
Read this book. You will not be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Worse than Newt Gingrich's '1945'
Review: Despite the literary difficulties, Littell actually has managed to write a more wretched historical novel than Newt Gingrich's '1945.' Hundreds of pages, and dozens of trees, could have been spared had 'The Company' simply been issued as a comic book, with no loss to Littell's elementary and one-dimensional characterizations: the novelist's John Kennedy, for example, inevitably comments "wryly" or "ironically," mafioso plotters inescapably speak of "des" and "dose," the red-haired Irish CIA agent is always ready for a fistfight or a drink, and let's not forget the Lope-de-Vega Cuban hitman who dramatically hisses "It would have been better if you had not been born" before his each and every act of histrionic violence. Worse, these cardboard CIA characters ride a Washington, D.C., subway system that didn't exist in the 1970s, helpfully define for the reader each jargon term employed in their dialog, in an unintentionally hilarious parody of 'Casablanca,' drown out the singing of some Russian hoods in a D.C. bar by standing up and bellowing out --- 'The Whiffenpoof Song'! As is evident, despite his publicist's puffery, Littell is no John LeCarre. I'd advise advoiding this adolescent and ill-digested dreck, and choosing a grown-up writer of espionage fiction, such as W.T. Tyler.
Rating: 
Summary: Lightweight but has its moments
Review: If you're going to wade through such a long historical novel, you need a reliable sense of realism. The frequent errors in the book undermine any hope of creating such a sense. Some of these errors, to be fair, are a result of shoddy editing and are more the publisher's fault: many of the italicized German phrases are misspelt (Jajd for Jagd, Jugund for Jugend) and the text is full of small misprints. But there are too many moments of outright foolishness. Agents write chatty personal letters to each other in which they discuss the presence of high ranking moles; in the happy CIA of the fifties, information is never compartmentalized, as shown by an agent in Germany who on his own initiative launches a global project to seek out a mole. "The Company" has its moments. I like the mole hunting, I like the Soviet Spymaster Starik and the paranoid Angleton. But because the book covers 4 decades, there's never time - even in 900 pages - to settle on any one event or person. Reading it is like catching a series of glimpses of a flimsy facade. You never get the chance to hang around long enough to see through it, but you constantly have the feeling of being short-changed. In the end it's a comic book masquerading as a weighty novel. Any comparisons with Le Carre's spy novels are, frankly, laughable. Still - if you're just looking for a summer read that you can sink into without over-taxing yourself, then this is probably a fine choice. Great for fans of James Clavell, I would think.
Rating:
Summary: Too much book, too little content
Review: Although I had read some decent reviews of this book, I found it to be way too long and very poorly written. The book manages to touch on many topics/activities/individuals over its 40 year time span, but there is little continuity and no depth to the characters, with a result that feels more like the checking off of an inventory of story ideas than a well thought out, well developed novel. The only aspect of this book that is worse than its story develpment is its editing. The copy that I received not only was missing some 30 pages, but was rife with factual, grammatical and spelling errors.
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