Despite new sources, Sloyan fails to offer a fresh assessment.
A journalist revisits John F. Kennedy’s legacy.
Beginning in 1960, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Sloyan wrote for the Washington bureau of United Press International, which gave him, he writes, “unimaginable power and influence.” Like many other journalists at the time, he saw Kennedy as a strong leader, “cool but daring.” In his debut nonfiction book, Sloyan revises that view, portraying Kennedy as a craven politician—“devious, ruthless…more pragmatic than principled." The author examines Kennedy’s last year, when Cuba, the incendiary civil rights movement and Vietnam dominated his agenda. Angry and disillusioned, he aims to reveal how Kennedy “duped me and other journalists into misleading readers, librarians, schoolteachers, historians, and filmmakers.” Basing this exposé on tapes Kennedy made using microphones he hid in the Cabinet Room and the Oval Office (a recording system he manipulated at will), as well as oral histories, interviews and historians’ accounts, Sloyan argues that Kennedy lied blatantly to burnish his image. Although journalists reported that he triumphed over Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis, the author asserts—as did Michael Dobbs in One Minute to Midnight (2008)—that he secretly acquiesced to the Soviet leader’s demand for missile exchange: Russia would remove missiles from Cuba if the U.S. took theirs out of Turkey. Like Gus Russo in Live by the Sword (1998), Sloyan details Kennedy’s attempts to have Castro assassinated, but Russo’s account is stronger. He attributes Kennedy’s reluctance to support civil rights to his need for Southern votes: He refused to fulfill his campaign promise to end housing segregation, “ignored civil rights leaders on judicial appointments in the South, where justice was brutal for blacks,” and targeted Martin Luther King, Jr. for intense surveillance, with the goal of blackmail. Sloyan devotes most of the book to Vietnam, where he lays the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem at Kennedy’s feet, as did Ellen Hammer in A Death in November (1987).
Despite new sources, Sloyan fails to offer a fresh assessment.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1250030597
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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