A superbly written account by someone who knows precisely what needs to be said and how to say it.
A magisterial assessment of how the Warren Commission's investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy stands up after the passage of 50 years.
In 1963, Willens, now a lawyer in private practice, was appointed to the commission. Here, the author uses his journal and notes from the commission's nine months of work as an unmatched framework for telling the story of JFK's assassination and the subsequent investigation. During the five decades since the event, no firsthand evidence has been brought forward to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin, nor that other shots were implicated in the crime. Therefore, none of the many conspiracy theories hold up. Evidence withheld by Richard Helms, director of the CIA, and J. Edgar Hoover, chief of the FBI, does not change this foundation in fact. Willens outlines the procedures adopted by the commission and how the staff was deployed. In order to establish how well the commission's work has stood the test of time, he reassesses the evidence assembled in light of the internal discussions within the commission and its staff, as well as among commission members and other government agencies. Formed shortly after the shooting on the initiative of President Lyndon Johnson, the commission moved rapidly to establish its own area of competence against the FBI, especially in the area of the shooter and the shooting. Willens reconstructs the investigators' work and describes how the final report was assembled, one chapter at a time, in response to questioning. Despite the countless conspiracy theories, Chief Justice Earl Warren was right to trust to history for vindication.
A superbly written account by someone who knows precisely what needs to be said and how to say it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0755-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
PERSPECTIVES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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