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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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