A laying of tombstones on 1964's Warren Commission Report and 1979's House Assassinations Committee report; by a former senior editor of Philadelphia magazine. Fonzi early found the Warren Report dependent almost entirely on doctored intelligence from the CIA and biased toward proving Oswald the lone gunman. An autopsy report written by FBI agents who witnessed the autopsy included a third bullet wound, in the shoulder, which the Warren Report ignored: Its inclusion, Fonzi says, would have undermined the Report's lone gunman bias. Elation filled Fonzi in 1975 when he was hired by Senator Richard Schweiker to head the Miami area of the reopened assassination investigation: This time, Congress was looking into the skewing of the Warren Report by US intelligence agencies. Said Schweiker: ``We don't know what happened but we do know Oswald had an intelligence connection. Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.'' But the Assassination Committee failed to break through the CIA's shield, Fonzi argues, then ``cover[ed] its ass'' by creating a biased report that diverted light on to the Mob and was the fruit of a ``pseudoinvestigation'' that was compromised at every turn by dark forces that chopped off its financial legs and disallowed resources for a real investigation. According to the author, three important witnesses committed suicide just hours before he was to interview them. Fonzi's own villain is ``Maurice Bishop,'' cover name for the CIA's David Atlee Phillips, who'd been observed with Oswald before the assassination. Fonzi's report turns on the identification of Phillips by Antonio Veciana, an anti- Castro assassin who worked for ``Maurice Bishop.'' Fonzi sticks mostly to personal knowledge, which adds persuasiveness to his theme that Oswald's ties to the CIA may veil the final answer to JFK's murder. (B&w photographs)
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1993
ISBN: 1-56025-052-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.
Noted number cruncher Sperling delivers an economist’s rejoinder to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Former director of the National Economic Council in the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the author has long taken a view of the dismal science that takes economic justice fully into account. Alongside all the metrics and estimates and reckonings of GDP, inflation, and the supply curve, he holds the great goal of economic policy to be the advancement of human dignity, a concept intangible enough to chase the econometricians away. Growth, the sacred mantra of most economic policy, “should never be considered an appropriate ultimate end goal” for it, he counsels. Though 4% is the magic number for annual growth to be considered healthy, it is healthy only if everyone is getting the benefits and not just the ultrawealthy who are making away with the spoils today. Defining dignity, admits Sperling, can be a kind of “I know it when I see it” problem, but it does not exist where people are a paycheck away from homelessness; the fact, however, that people widely share a view of indignity suggests the “intuitive universality” of its opposite. That said, the author identifies three qualifications, one of them the “ability to meaningfully participate in the economy with respect, not domination and humiliation.” Though these latter terms are also essentially unquantifiable, Sperling holds that this respect—lack of abuse, in another phrasing—can be obtained through a tight labor market and monetary and fiscal policy that pushes for full employment. In other words, where management needs to come looking for workers, workers are likely to be better treated than when the opposite holds. In still other words, writes the author, dignity is in part a function of “ ‘take this job and shove it’ power,” which is a power worth fighting for.
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7987-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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