I found this book on the recommended table at Indigos a couple weeks ago, finding it available at the library that evening, and started reading with what I thought would be enough time to read leisurely.

I wasn't correct on the leisurely, as the book read more slowly than I expected it to read. Some books are like that: the writing fits into your brain and the words read easily. I believe Stephen King's works are like this, which is a good reason his books are so popular. Sometimes the books are not like that: the writing feels wrong, is slow going, requires a shift in the reader's brain to accommodate the words. Inkheart by Cornelia Funke was one of these books. The Septimus Heap books were also like that. This one is like that, too.

But, hooboy, Gordievsky's story? WOW!

That the book is non-fiction is even more WOW!

Who says one man can't change the world? We keep seeing evidence of one man being able to change the world and in a positive direction.

Gordievsky was a KGB agent who saw how Communism doesn't work as a political structure. There are ebbs and flows in the levels of freedom, with Communism being so far on the authoritarian scale as to be ultimately unsustainable, and Gordievsky saw this. Disagreeing with the lack of personal freedoms in his country, he worked to reduce its strength.
He didn't take it down, but he did affect things in very large, very positive ways, and for that, we thank him.

It's odd to read history with a happy ending, tbh. There were a number of recollection quotes early in the book that indicated Gordievsky lives through his ordeal, but I still needed to read his Wikipedia page to skip to the end (yes, as I do). Gordievsky's tale is worth reading on more than a Wikipedia page.

Oh, this is such a lovely book.

Based on the title, we know it is a book dealing with time travel (else why have a time war?). There's the briefest of adjustments in the beginning with the world building, and then we see that while the book is science fiction with two sides having agents who skip through time lines adjusting a world here, changing an action there, in order to shape the future into each side's desired outcome, and then we arrive at the heart of the tale, which is a love story.

The ending of the book is so beautiful that one wants to (and should) immediately flip back to the beginning of the book and read it again, pick up the details missed in the first reading, understand where the threads twist and cross. The different elements of history woven into the story make the story that much more beautiful.

Thoroughly enjoyed the book. Strongly recommended.

But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her child does, or a smuggler she trades jackets with in some distant spaceport. And all this blood for nothing.
Page 2

Killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique. Having killed never does, for Red. Her fellow agents do not feel the same, or they hide it better.
Page 3

"If train A leaves Toronto at six p.m. travelling east at one hundred kilometres per hour, and train B leaves Ottawa at seven p.m. travelling west at one hundred twenty kilometres per hour, when will they cross?”
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