by Hugh Aynesworth ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2013
A solid tale of a momentous event—for those who need another or want to pick up a few unknown nuggets from a man who was...
An eyewitness rehash of the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Veteran journalist Aynesworth (JFK: Breaking the News, 2003, etc.), then a reporter with the Dallas Morning News, was not on assignment but chatting with friends in Dealey Plaza when JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald. With a pencil bought from a nearby child, he began taking notes on the backs of utility bills. His eyewitness articles on the assassination and both the arrest and killing of Oswald won him accolades as the reporter who owned the assassination story. This book, first published 10 years ago and now reissued to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination, offers a vivid recounting of those chaotic days. Many other books offer fuller, more thoughtful accounts, but Aynesworth’s just-the-facts reporting can raise goose bumps. The entire bizarre cast is here: ex-Marine shooter Oswald; strip-club owner Jack Ruby, the unsavory and unstable character who killed the assassin, shouting, “You rat son of a bitch!”; and Marguerite Oswald, the assassin’s combative mother. Readers alive at the time will have forgotten many details, such as the fact that six reporters served as Oswald’s pallbearers. Aynesworth takes delight in noting the inaccuracies in the first report from the scene by United Press International reporter Merriman Smith, who physically prevented the AP reporter from phoning in news of the assassination. The author dismisses all conspiracy theories, blaming them on the “pervasive influence” of Oswald, an “inadequate mope” who appeared incapable of such a crime; Ruby, who acted spontaneously (and did not know Oswald); and the excesses of early conspiracy theorists Mark Lane and Jim Garrison.
A solid tale of a momentous event—for those who need another or want to pick up a few unknown nuggets from a man who was there.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61254-127-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Brown Books
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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