For assassination and conspiracy-theory buffs, a windfall. For everyone else, another exercise in guesswork.
Just in time for the 45th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy comes this intriguing, if not necessarily convincing, collection of pieces on the matter.
In 2007, famed Manson Family prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi published his 1,600-page tome Reclaiming History, which examined nearly every theory advanced on the Dallas killing, concluding that, yes, Lee Harvey Oswald did it alone. By Russell’s (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1992, etc.) account, Bugliosi “seems to have ended up with considerable egg on his face” given findings released in the last couple years. These include a putative pre-deathbed confession on the part of Watergate burglar and spook E. Howard Hunt asserting that he “was aware of a conspiracy involving Vice President Johnson, the CIA, Cuban exiles, and a ‘French gunman’ on the grassy knoll,” along with an Italian weapons test that supposedly proves the impossibility of Oswald’s having fired three shots with an old carbine and a Texas A&M report indicating that the forensic evidence does not rule out the possibility of a second gunman. Gathering pieces he wrote in the ’70s for the Village Voice and adding new material, Russell weaves several possibilities. Suffice it to say that anti-Castro Cuban counterrevolutionaries, rogue intelligence agents, the Soviets and various other actors—including Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele—somehow figure in. Less speculative is Russell’s reporting on how the established media swiftly abandoned any pretense of investigation and instead accepted the Warren Commission report. Yet much of the argument is from silence, as when Russell urges that the images of Oswald after being arrested constitute some sort of proof of innocence: “In the midst of chaos at police headquarters, he possessed an almost uncanny calm, as if certain that this rather bizarre circumstance would soon be cleared up and the truth made known.” Fair enough—but then Oswald could have been a grinning loony, too.
For assassination and conspiracy-theory buffs, a windfall. For everyone else, another exercise in guesswork.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60239-322-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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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