All walks of life are represented in this immense cross section of Americans' grief and groping for comprehension.
A mostly reverential compendium of voices touched by the promise and spirit of John F. Kennedy’s presidency—and the shock of his death.
Keen observers of the president, members of his devoted staff, children of his advisers, civil rights leaders, eyewitness journalists and youth inspired by his brief, shining administration—all offer their concise statements and appraisals in veteran journalist Owen’s collection. The author was just 7 years old on the date of the assassination, riveted like the rest of the country to the TV (“the centrifuge of the country,” as Tom Brokaw calls it) and ultimately galvanized by the craft of journalism. Some of the accounts are extracts from copyrighted statements evidently published in previous books, such as Walter F. Mondale’s The Good Fight and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, all of which expound poignantly on this most intimate “death in the family.” Some of the statements are truly elucidating and mesmerizing, such as those by then–special assistant counsel Joseph A. Califano Jr., who proudly applauded JFK’s prescient civil rights speech of June 1963 (a crusade taken up by his brother, Robert); and by Rev. Billy Graham, who had spent time with the president and was impressed by his concern “about the moral and spiritual condition of the nation,” noting the day after Kennedy died that “the entire nation [was] thinking more about death and eternity than at any time since the war.” Other accounts are more curious and questionable, such as those by Army officer Andy Carlson, who led the riderless horse “Black Jack” during the funeral, and by Ruth Paine, who was living with Marina Oswald at the time. Given the ongoing, apparently insatiable curiosity about the Kennedy assassination, most readers will probably find it all equally fascinating.
All walks of life are represented in this immense cross section of Americans' grief and groping for comprehension.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62636-034-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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