In the seemingly neverending arms race between the lone-assassin and the conspiracy theorists, Kaiser adds a serious piece...
A historian takes us, once more, down the rabbit hole surrounding the events of November 22, 1963.
After 45 years and countless books devoted to the subject—including last-word, authoritative treatments like Gerald Posner’s Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993) and Vincent Bugliosi’s recent Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (2007)—a surprisingly high percentage of the American public refuses to accept the Warren Commission’s conclusion that a lone gunman killed JFK. Kaiser (History/Naval War Coll.; American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War, 2000, etc.) agrees that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered the president, but the author depicts him as the simultaneous pawn of organized crime, defending itself against relentless prosecution by Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, and of “the U.S. government–sponsored or tolerated anti-Castro movement,” dedicated to overthrowing or killing the dictator. Both of Kaiser’s plots center on formerly mob-friendly Cuba which, under Castro, became a communist thorn in the Kennedy administration’s side. Relying on raw data available to the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, materials released pursuant to 1992’s JFK Records Act, Soviet archives and the work of previous authors, Kaiser submits his professional historian credentials as a good reason to prefer his analysis over the investigations of his many predecessors. Why his qualifications trump those of, say, Posner or Bugliosi, attorneys well-accustomed to assembling and assessing evidence, Kaiser doesn’t venture. Still, the narrative’s level of detail, sober style, strict adherence to its double-track theory and plausible argument make it worthy of consideration. Kaiser’s scenario hangs together, but it depends on constructions—e.g., the veracity of anti-Castro activist and crucial witness Silvia Odio, the certainty that Oswald was a phony leftist—vigorously and just as reliably disputed elsewhere.
In the seemingly neverending arms race between the lone-assassin and the conspiracy theorists, Kaiser adds a serious piece of scholarship to the arsenal of those who believe Americans have yet to learn the whole truth about the assassination of JFK.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-674-02766-4
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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