A book that will fuel conspiracy theorists and further blacken Johnson’s legacy.
Linking LBJ to blackmail, intimidation, and even murder.
Mellen (English/Temple Univ.; The Great Game in Cuba: How the CIA Sabotaged its Own Plot to Unseat Fidel Castro, 2013, etc.) chronicles “the dark side of Lyndon Johnson” by investigating two men whom she finds surprisingly absent from Robert A. Caro’s acclaimed four-volume Johnson biography: financier and con man Billie Sol Estes, who accused Johnson of orchestrating multiple murders, and Malcolm Everett "Mac" Wallace, a fellow Texan who the author claims was Johnson’s acolyte. Estes’ scandalous machinations made national news, but Wallace’s service as Johnson’s “hatchet man” is little known. “Wallace’s story is so intriguing,” writes the author, “because, unlike other of Johnson’s acolytes, it is difficult to prove what he did for [LBJ], and what [LBJ], in turn, did for him.” Mellen’s handling of evidence makes her argument disturbing and, in parts, confusing. In mounting her indictment of Johnson as a manipulative, power-hungry politician who considered himself above the law (a portrait that Caro endorses), the author assumes that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. “Circumstantial evidence…is most certainly evidence,” she asserts, and hearsay provokes her interest. Her sources include research into Johnson’s life and politics conducted by reporter Holland McCombs, on assignment for Life; and the files of John Fraser Harrison, a former Dallas reserve police officer obsessed with finding “the Texas roots of the Kennedy assassination.” Besides damning Johnson, Mellen aims to counter Estes’ accusation that Wallace served as Johnson’s hit man and, on Johnson’s orders, was at the Texas School Book Depository when Kennedy was shot. Although she finds “no credible evidence” for either claim, Mellen blows plenty of smoke toward Johnson: “Loose ends, contradictory facts suggesting Lyndon Johnson’s complicity, remain.” She also accuses Johnson of racism (admittedly, not a new claim) and, for reasons of international intrigue, of refusing to rescue sailors on the USS Liberty after it was bombed in 1967.
A book that will fuel conspiracy theorists and further blacken Johnson’s legacy.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62040-806-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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