Strong scenario by a Texas attorney for J. Edgar Hoover's complicity in the assassination of President Kennedy by the Carlos Marcello mafia family of New Orleans. Readers of Mark Lane's Plausible Denial (reviewed above) will be hard-pressed to correlate North's evidence with Lane's eyewitness account (taken under oath) of CIA master-spy E. Howard Hunt's payoff to the actual killers, implicating the CIA as the top conspirator. But North's evidence also takes on force and in no way can be seen as cheap and sleazy. What's clear from both books is that Warren Commission members gave false testimony frequently and that the Commission's report can be written off as a fabrication aimed at relieving the populace of worry about a conspiracy. After reading these two books, nobody could believe that Oswald alone killed Kennedy. North focuses on the upcoming forced retirement of Hoover as director of the FBI (to take place when Kennedy won his second term) and Hoover's bitter resistance to that ouster and animus toward Attorney General Robert Kennedy. RFK was making it superhot for the mafia, while Hoover, the AG's investigative arm, was refusing to cooperate. Through electronic surveillance, Hoover learned that Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa had put out a contract on RFK, while later surveillance apparently revealed that the Marcello crime family was organizing a hit on JFK, whose loss would dampen RFK's ardor to indict them. The law says that Hoover was bound to report these death threats to the Secret Service. Instead, North argues, he sat on them and entered into a sweetheart pact with Vice President Johnson, who was sweating over his criminal acts in Texas that were about to be revealed by RFK. With the Kennedys silenced, Johnson and Hoover would be in clover. North's general lines of reasoning are abundantly enforced by Hoover's own memos, among other sources. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1991
ISBN: 0-88184-747-X
Page Count: 672
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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