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
Imagine a collaboration between Arnold Toynbee and R. Crumb and you get a pretty good idea of Gonick's clever and ambitious comic book series. This volume should not be taken as some kind of Mel Brooksish joke. Gonick does his research and interprets his sources with scholarly care. Inspired by the educational comic books of Latin American artist RIUS, Gonick makes world history a blast— literally, with his predilection for onomatopoeic word balloons. In this second collection—the last left us with Alexander the Great schlepping toward Persia—Gonick takes us on a side tour through India and China. He integrates myth and history to establish the origins of sectarian conflict in India, and attends to migration patterns from the Middle East to China in order to explain the development of Buddhism and Confucianism. Dynamic intrigue and the threat of northern barbarians compete with periods of prolonged peace. This highly selective version of Chinese history, though full of diverting stories, will be a bit confusing to readers unfamiliar with the main players. Back in Rome, meanwhile, after the death of Alexander, the republic enters its period of glory, followed by the building of the empire. Problems of succession lead to lots of lurid anecdotes about perverse and insatiable emperors, violent entertainments, brutal conquests—all of which Gonick records with Mad-like irreverence. He equivocates, however, in telling the story of Jesus, ending up with an uneasy mix of canonical fact and outright heresy. His account of the historical rise of Christianity is superb and demonstrates an interesting parallel with China: In both cases alien cults from the edge of the empires eventually captured the capital cities. Gonick's humor is mostly visual and relies on the juxtaposition of comical images with his relatively sober text. Despite his lefty, multi-culty inclinations, Gonick maintains the high level of sophistication, skepticism, and just plain fun established by the first volume.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-42093-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A spectacular, startling, and sometimes downright grisly chronicle, in words and pictures, of a bloody and tumultuous period. Alongside a stunning battery of photographs scoured from archives and collections throughout the former Soviet empire, the vast majority of them unfamiliar, Moynahan (Comrades, 1992) unfolds a history short on depth but told in crisp, imagistic (not to say strongly opinionated) prose. To his great credit, he persistently strives to include not only the obvious historical milestones— wars, revolutions, terror, famine, and the like (every horseman of the apocalypse gallops across the tortured steppes)—but also some sense of the evolving everyday sensory and emotional realities of Russian life under czar, dictator, and infant democracy. In this, he's not only immeasurably aided but inevitably outshone by the pageant of superbly reproduced photographs to which every reader will be immediately drawn and which, highlighting the human figure at the expense of landscape, run the gamut from imperial family portraits and staged Party propaganda scenes to snatched samizdat documents of ghetto and gulag, to the innovative high art of Rodchenko. Behind the familiar official faces of the masters- -Rasputin's manic stare, Trotsky's compelling gaze, Stalin's sly squint, Yeltsin's pugnacious querulousness—and the distortions of official history, both amply evidenced here, the photos unearth a vast parade of their nameless subjects (and, more often then not, victims)—``ordinary'' workers, peasants, soldiers, priests, shopkeepers. Too often it's a gallery of the unquiet dead: These pages are as corpse-strewn as the history they record—slain in purges, pogroms, insurrections, invasions, by starvation or single bullet, piled high by roadsides, dumped into mass graves, even, most shockingly and indelibly, filleted on the dining table of famine-stricken peasants driven to cannibalism. No mere coffee-table ornament, but a historical document of great drama and unusual intensity.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42075-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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