Stone may be right, but his book is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree.
Another in the long line of JFK assassination conspiracy books.
The first sentence in the book is: "I recognize that those who question the government's official contentions regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy are labeled by many in the mainstream media as 'nuts,' 'kooks' and worse." Stone—who shares a byline with journalist Colapietro but writes very personally throughout—uses the rest of the preface to explain why he believes his personal knowledge of political players makes him different. Unfortunately, he shoots himself in the foot. He certainly has political chops, but his pro–Richard Nixon bias is extreme. Further, he seems to hate Lyndon Johnson purely out of Nixon loyalty. After introducing himself, Stone’s writing lacks the cohesion that would make his argument believable. He presents conclusions as a given long before presenting his supporting evidence and jumps from topic to topic and scene to scene with few transitions. In one memorable section about how Nixon learned of the assassination, Stone inserts a few paragraphs midstory about Johnson trying to keep Nixon from winning in 1968. In the end, readers are unsure of how Nixon’s lines of communication have anything to do with who killed Kennedy and are left wondering why a former Democratic president wouldn’t try to keep a Republican from winning the position. Stone does present some compelling evidence for his argument, but the scattered format and hatred for Johnson make it difficult to focus on those portions. He is at his most clear and convincing when simply pointing out the likelihood that there was some conspiracy afoot in the assassination rather than trying to prove that Johnson was at the helm.
Stone may be right, but his book is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62636-313-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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 Yorker staff 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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