The sordid, sweeping history of what Kennedy insider Pierre Salinger dubbed “a blood feud.”
Seattle Times investigations editor Neff (The Wrong Man: The Final Verdict on the Dr. Sam Sheppard Murder Case, 2001, etc.) turns his attention to the visceral war of wills between Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa.
This account of Kennedy’s crusade against corrupt union officials and organized crime may not be as cinematic as Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies or as darkly subversive as the fiction of James Ellroy, although it does share a kindred spirit with them. However, by transposing these two larger-than-life characters and utilizing his own considerable investigative skills, Neff succeeds in shining a light on one of the darker corners of American history. The book opens on a critical moment, as Kennedy learns of the assassination of his brother in Dallas and Hoffa coldly observes, “Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.” From there, the story jumps back to 1956, when Kennedy was chief counsel for the Senate investigations committee and Hoffa was vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, using intimidation, threats, fraud, and violence to control his sphere of influence. Their conflict was inevitable, as Kennedy saw Hoffa as “weak, unbalanced, crooked and greedy,” while Hoffa considered the Kennedy brothers to be “ ‘spoiled brats,’ soft-handed Ivy League types who had little understanding of the working man.” Neff deftly portrays their volatile relationship through the McClellan Committee hearings in the Senate, where Hoffa displayed an intuitive ability to avoid telling the truth, all the way through the Kennedy presidency, when the younger Kennedy used his startling appointment as Attorney General to form the “Get Hoffa” squad to dig deep into the labor leader’s taxes and finances. At times, the book reads like a spy novel, as both camps used double agents, secret recordings, tails, and blackmail to keep track of their opponents. Ultimately, Kennedy is something of an enigma, while Neff paints Hoffa as having a grudging affection for his nemesis.
The sordid, sweeping history of what Kennedy insider Pierre Salinger dubbed “a blood feud.”Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-73834-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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