A pulpy book that plays out historical conspiracy theory with a chilling specificity.
Recounting Richard Nixon’s ties to mobsters, malfeasance, and, potentially, the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Former Washington United Press International bureau chief Fulsom (Treason: Nixon and the 1968 Election, 2015, etc.) has long been considering Nixon’s unsavory record: “The first inklings I had that Richard Nixon was somehow mixed up with the Mafia came during the 50 or so trips I made to cover the candidate, president-elect, and then president at his Key Biscayne, Florida, home.” The author argues that beyond the shameful Watergate break-in that ended his presidency, Nixon was long accustomed to shady dealings with dangerous, powerful figures, at odds with his public image of sour probity. He develops this most powerfully with regard to Nixon’s early years, noting how his political rise mirrored organized crime’s apex of covert power. He attributes this to Nixon’s cultivation of behind-the-curtain types such as his close friend Bebe Rebozo, “eventually looked up to by the nation’s top gangsters.” Nixon developed the habit of building a war chest of illicit donations, which allowed the mobsters to make connections that benefitted them hugely during his presidency, as federal law enforcement soft-pedaled their prosecutions. As vice president, Nixon delighted in overseeing covert operations, including plots against Fidel Castro. Fulsom digresses from his focus on Nixon to look at theories that the anti-Castro Mafia–CIA cabal engineered the assassination of JFK. Examining sources including the Nixon White House tapes and noting Nixon’s presence in Dallas on the fateful day, the author catalogs many unanswered questions about whether the conspiracy reached him, noting that afterward, “Nixon’s actions often contradicted his words when it came to discussing the Kennedy assassination.” Fulsom relies heavily on other sources, from the reputable to the marginal. He retells this narrative colorfully, but his depictions of people like Rebozo, Jack Ruby, and various mobsters and CIA agents become repetitive, and the book suffers from the lack of a fuller interpretive discussion of Nixon’s times and unique, if warped perspective.
A pulpy book that plays out historical conspiracy theory with a chilling specificity.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11940-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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
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
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