Giant, solo, 17-year investigation into a man allegedly hired to kill Lee Harvey Oswald and prevent the assassination of JFK. This ten-pound plate of assassination spaghetti and supposition has much to recommend it, including immense research and documentation, and may bear on any final understanding about the apparent plot to kill Kennedy. Russell shows how several schemes gathered steam and then fell through before the final plot succeeded. The thrust of Russell's book is that a double agent for the CIA and the KGB, Richard Case Nagell—who is still alive and has contributed quite a bit to the present work—not only knew Oswald before the killing and was privy to information about several plots to kill the President, but was also part of several espionage dramas played out during the summer of 1963. While under the belief that he was working for the CIA in gathering information about five different groups that were creating the climate for the assassination, Nagell discovered that his real sponsor was the KGB- -and that he was being set up to kill Oswald in Mexico City and derail the JFK assassination. Nagell allegedly has a tape recording (made secretly by himself) of Oswald and fellow conspirators making plans, while Russell says that he has eye-witness proof that the murder rifle was found on the fourth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, then moved to the sixth; and he claims that oil billionaire H.L. Hunt bought the Zapruder film before Time-Life got its duplicate—which Time-Life thought was the original. Deep wading, with a 15-page ``Cast of Characters'' to keep straight.
Pub Date: Dec. 29, 1992
ISBN: 0-88184-900-6
Page Count: 816
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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