Thomas, Gordon and Dillon, Martin. Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002. 448 pages.

Robert Maxwell was a British publishing tycoon who jumped, fell, or was thrown off of his yacht in 1991 and drowned. He was also an agent of influence for Israel's Mossad during the 1980s. When his media empire became financially overextended in the late 1980s, Maxwell began robbing the pension funds of thousands of employees.

Beyond this brief summary, however, there isn't much that can be said with any certainty about Robert Maxwell. The lead author of this biography, Gordon Thomas, has good connections with sources in Israel, but these sources often have their own agendas. In addition, Thomas -- after 43 books and 45 million copies to his credit -- writes as if he was competing with Tom Clancy. Reconstructed dialog and unreliable sources appear everywhere, and the murder scenario at the end seems entirely speculative. This cannot be considered an authoritative biography, even though 54 people were interviewed over two years. The material on Promis, the software program that magically synthesizes every database on earth, came mostly from Ari Ben-Menashe. The Promis chapter in Ben-Menashe's 1992 autobiography was basically unbelievable, which makes it doubly disappointing to see it presented uncritically here.
ISBN 0-7867-1078-0

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