Levelheaded and informative: a former FBI agent on the whodunit of the century. Hosty earned unwanted notoriety as the man who was in touch with Oswald before the Kennedy assassination. It was a routine part of a heavy caseload, but it opened the door for Hosty's scapegoating by the FBI, the Dallas police, and the media. Thirty years later we benefit: A straightforward mind inured to the ways of bureaucracies has thought long and hard on the subject of the assassination and the way its investigation was handled. Hosty's book is full of acute character sketches (including a painfully dazed Allen Dulles) and summations of interoffice and interagency politics. It is also a portrait of a man whose life in post- Eisenhower America—his ranch house on a 12-home street that boasted 55 kids—was a sort of regular-guy idyll. Hosty's vision of this world, of Hoover's button-down, byzantine FBI, of a lost America, has an unvarnished Rotarian grace and an unexpected richness. An experienced and skeptical investigator, Hosty soft- pedals his take on who was responsible, but offers this: Marina Oswald fit the FBI's criteria for ``sleeper'' KGB agents, and Oswald's meeting of her is somewhat similar to that of an obscure young American who defected to Russia and then decided to return, only to be offered a convenient wife by the KGB. Castro knew about Oswald's intentions, even if he didn't incite them. Oswald's pre- assassination visit to Mexico City included a meeting with a representative of the KGB's Division 13, which handled terrorism and assassination. Hosty has a shoe-leather reasonableness; his perspective is unique. Oddly resonant and affecting, Hosty's contribution to assassination literature is minor but rock-solid: a must-read for buffs. Watch official America play CYA.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55970-311-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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