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
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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