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
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
