A clearly written but fevered polemic on the corruption of power, built around an intriguing theory, but it lacks a smoking...
Did a well-known society lawyer keep the secrets of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?
Title aside, only the final chapters of the book examine the toxic biography of Joseph P. Kennedy. Instead, Shaw takes an unusual route into the thicket of JFK conspiracy literature, focusing on the perturbing question of why the flamboyant civil attorney Melvin Belli, an associate of mobsters, would have been recruited to provide Jack Ruby’s defense following his televised shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. Belli pursued a strange “psychomotor epilepsy insanity defense,” here termed “absurd,” which failed at trial; Ruby died in 1967 awaiting a new trial after his subsequent death sentence was overturned on appeal. Later, Belli avoided the topic, telling conflicting stories about how he came to represent Ruby. Gangster Santo Trafficante supposedly warned notorious mob attorney Frank Ragano—whose memoir, closely examined by Shaw, implicates Jimmy Hoffa and others in the conspiracy—to never ask Belli about Ruby. Thus, Shaw argues that “probing Belli’s behavior before, during and after the Ruby case is essential to any search for the truth” about the killings. Certainly, Belli seems capable of obfuscation; the author portrays him as “a braggart of the first degree [and] a Mafia groupie.” Shaw finds it suspect that Belli’s trial gambit was to make Ruby look “crazy when no one else in the real world thought he was” and ultimately argues that Belli was a plant meant to subtly control Ruby. The problem, as with most JFK assassination conspiracy theories, is the difficulty of directly connecting Belli’s curious behavior to the purported Mafia assassination conspiracy.
A clearly written but fevered polemic on the corruption of power, built around an intriguing theory, but it lacks a smoking gun.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62636-060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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