The author of Rush to Judgment, the first book to attack the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of JFK, takes on the CIA's possible role in the murder, by way of Florida jury trial. It was Mark Lane who found a CIA conspiracy behind the Jonestown massacre (he was there) in 1979's The Strongest Poison and FBI complicity in 1977's Code Name ``Zorro'': The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. This time out he offers his most damning version yet of CIA wrongdoing. Lane assembles his evidence with a trial lawyer's cool skill and builds to a riveting climax: an eyewitness account of CIA spy E. Howard Hunt paying off a CIA- backed Cuban assassination team in Dallas the night before the murder and clearly setting up Jack Ruby—before the assassination- -to kill Oswald, the patsy, who never fired a shot. Lane's evidence is drawn from a trial he conducted in Florida in 1978 while defending a small political magazine, Spotlight, which had lost a $650,000 defamation suit brought against it by Hunt. The magazine claimed that Hunt was in Dallas at the time of the assassination while Hunt claimed he was in Washington, D.C. When the appellate court vacated the decision and called for a second trial, Spotlight's owner called in Lane to defend him. Lane saw a case he might well lose, but also his first opportunity ever to cross- examine top figures in Lane's assassination scenario. And indeed he deposes CIA directors Richard Helms and Stansfield Turner, G. Gordon Liddy, Hunt himself—and strikes gold in CIA agent Marita Lorenz, who accompanied two cars full of guns and assassins from Miami to Dallas and, under oath, names all of them, then tells of a follow-up talk with the proud top assassin who pulled off ``the really big one...we killed the president....'' Well-reasoned at every point, Lane's convincing report sounds like the last word on the assassination—but for an alternate scenario, see Mark North's Act of Treason (below).
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1991
ISBN: 1-56025-000-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
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