When I went to Bali for the first time my first stop was at the Bintang, Kuta's biggest and most modern supermarket. What you see there is how people live, their most pressing preoccupations that can be fulfilled in a retail environment will be present, their appetites, drinking habits and economic status, all are on shown in the bright lighting of a supermarket. I feel that a country reveals itself through its supermarkets. Ok, what I really want to write about is supermarkets. After a fascinating, adventure-filled life lived larger than most people's imaginations, she got executed. It was about an extremely interesting, beautiful and intelligent woman who switched between extreme morality and amorality as and when it suited her. I don't really want to review the book, which was excellent, four and a half stars. The very prosaic answer was just round the corner: it's the name of the largest department store in Kuta. When I first went to Bali, I saw billboard signs for Mata Hari and I thought wow, is there some sort of film about her life they are advertising? Then I discovered that the word for sun is matahari.
Once called "an orchid in a field of dandelions," Mata Hari was one of a kind, a rich and multifaceted personality whose ambitions and talents propelled her breathtaking rise-and her tragic fall. Shipman reveals new information about this beautiful, brilliant, and dangerous woman, tracing the web of connections between her professional and personal lives. Mata Hari's life reads like both an action-packed adventure tale and passionate, poignant romance. Fleeing her tragic marriage, she reinvented herself as Mata Hari, a scandalously sensual dancer with an Indies name and an Indies aura about her novel "artistic" dances. Shuttled off to reluctant relations, Margaretha impulsively married a much older man, who gave her syphilis (then incurable) and took her to the Dutch East Indies, where the unhappy marriage exploded into vicious hatred following the death of their oldest child. Her blissful Dutch childhood as Margaretha Zelle ended abruptly with her parents' emotionally scarring divorce and, shortly after, her mother's death. But was she actually a spy? In this persuasive new biography, Pat Shipman explores the life and times of the mythic and deeply misunderstood dark-eyed siren to find the truth. The mistress of many senior Allied officers and government officials, even the French minister of war, she had a sharp intellect and a golden tongue fluent in several languages she also traveled widely throughout wartorn Europe, with seeming disregard for the political and strategic alliances and borders. In 1917, the notorious Oriental dancer Mata Hari was arrested on the charge of espionage less than one year later she was tried and executed-charged with the deaths of at least 50,000 gallant French soldiers.
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