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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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