by Patricia Lambert ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 24, 1999
Revisionist history confronts revisionist history as the author debunks the conspiracy theory surrounding the assassination of John Kennedy that persists to this day. In March of 1967, Clay Shaw was arrested by flamboyant Now Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison and charged with conspiring to murder the president. Behind the arrest lay months and years of investigation. Shaw was linked to another conspirator, David Ferrie, and to Lee Harvey Oswald himself. (Ferrie’s library card was found in Oswald’s pocket on the day he shot Kennedy.) Eyewitnesses saw the three together, mysteriously appearing in the small town of Clinton, La. Another witness described their open talk of killing the president. Links were found to anti-Castro Cubans, the Mafia, the CIA. Shaw was shown to be a sadistic homosexual who wished to kill the president for the kinky thrill of it. Oliver Stone made a successful film of the story. The only trouble is, according to Lambert, it’s all a pack of lies, based on deception, innuendo, hatred, ambition, and stupidity. The whole thing started when two down-and-outers on the New Orleans scene made up a couple stories, and Garrison, always ambitious, chose to believe and pursue them, though the men later recanted. Lambert does an amazing job of meticulously revealing the truth behind the lies. Through exhaustive research, countless interviews, endless reviews of Garrison’s investigations and findings, she convincingly destroys virtually all the elements of the conspiracy theory Garrison so carefully wove. Here Garrison is no admirable Kevin Costner, but rather a hateful homophobic egomaniac willfully destroying an innocent man. Shaw was, after all, acquitted. Here Stone is no daring filmmaker, but a foolish, gullible man willing to believe anything. And in an America ever mistrustful of its government, both are all to readily believed. While flawed (Lambert pursues her own character assassinations at times), this is investigative reporting at its finest. It should put to rest at least some of the conspiracy notions surrounding JFK’s death. But it probably won’t.
Pub Date: March 24, 1999
ISBN: 0-87131-879-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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