I'm so happy to share my mom Anne Tazewell's book here! She shares her journey of discovering the life of her dad and my CIA grandfather James Eichelberger.
Read the interview I did with her about the process of writing this book.
These are signed copies and shipping is free on this item!
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Spies, lies and family ties
Her father was a man cloaked in mystery, a man of contradiction. James M. Eichelberger was a writer, philosopher, decorated WWII intelligence officer, CIA Agent, and oil industry consultant who died a penniless alcoholic. After he left her family in Beirut, Lebanon when she was six years old, Anne E. Tazewell only saw her father seven times before his death in 1989.
A back-packing nature-loving world traveler, Anne discovered her professional passion after parenting three children and going to college in her mid-forties. Her calling to reduce the use of oil to mitigate the worst of what is to come with climate change is what brought her father back into her life decades after his death. A chance radio interview began a quest to understand his life and in turn better understand her own.
A Good Spy Leaves No Trace is part ghost story, part secret political history, part call to action and part family memoir. It is an investigation of loss, love, oil, and the alternatives, a story both personal and political. At its heart, A Good Spy is a multigenerational account about family. It is about using the alchemical power of family and acceptance to heal.
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Reviews
A Good Spy tells a fascinating story of the author's journey to confront the facts around her mysterious CIA agent father -- and at the same time shed light on her own shadow. A dedicated environmental, anti-war, anti-fossil fuels activist daughter of a military-industrial-complex, oil company mercenary soldier, she weaves a tale that is a microcosm for the dualities that confront our world today.
—John Perkins, New York Time Best Selling Author of The New Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man.
Anne Tazewell has written an evocative memoir about her quest to unmask the life of her elusive father, a CIA officer who operated in the Middle East in the 1950s and 60s. It is an important spy story, charmingly told, and along the way readers will bump into a colorful cast of spooks, including Miles Copeland, Kim Philby and Kermit and Archie Roosevelt. A captivating story.
- Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate—and most recently The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.
Mission Impossible meets Eat, Pray, Love. This is a riveting, powerfully written espionage thriller with a deeply personal journey into the shadowlands of the human heart. Tazewell masterfully weaves together a search for her father's spy secrets with her own buried truths. It is a stunning, revelatory read.
—Will Harlan, author of the New York Times best selling biography Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America.
A GOOD SPY entwines a passionate quest to uncover her father's secret, real life Clancy-esque thriller life with an untold history of events in the Middle East that shaped the world we live in today. Anne Tazewell captures the intimate, the power, the personal pain and the sheer force of world events that make this true life saga one of the most critical foreign policy reads in decades.
In other words - damn, it's great.
—Josh Tickell, Author and Film Director, including Kiss The Ground - How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body & Ultimately Save Our World.
In this captivating and moving memoir, a CIA daughter goes in search of the truth about her spy father, a brilliant but troubled man present at the creation of modern U.S.-Middle East relations.
— Hugh Wilford, author of America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East.
About the Author
Anne E Tazewell has been a vegetarian restaurant owner and chef, a textile artist in Key West and an award-winning advocate for the environment for over three decades. For the past seventeen years she has served as a clean energy expert at NC State University where she has received grants totaling over fifteen million dollars for her work. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from Goucher College and lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.
