Bugliosi does himself and his argument no favors with his tone of flippancy and dismissiveness, as when he chides conspiracy...
Manson Family prosecutor Bugliosi (Helter Skelter, 1974, etc.) takes on the endless and various host of JFK conspiracy buffs in this ponderous tome.
By the author’s count, there are nearly 350 organizations and individuals who have been implicated in the conspiracy theories swirling around the president’s murder on November 22, 1963. Most of the buffs advancing them, he growls, are “as kooky as a three-dollar bill in their beliefs and paranoia about the assassination,” and he has a point; one multi-conspiracy advocate, reminded that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had not been named as a party in the assassination and cover-up, replied, “Give us time.” The point of this metropolitan phone book–sized volume, it seems, is to dismantle those theories one by one, in sometimes tedious and overladen detail; but given the multiplicity of those theories and the evidence required to dispel them, it is hard to imagine that the book or approach could have been much different. Perhaps the most pervasive argument—apart from the overarching one that Lee Harvey Oswald could not, for various reasons, have acted alone—is that the Warren Commission deliberately acted to suppress evidence of conspiracy, to which one counsel tells Bugliosi, “The one thing I wanted to do was find a conspiracy…. If I could have found…that Oswald didn’t do it, I’d have been the senator from Ohio, not John Glenn.” In turn, Bugliosi examines and then dismisses theories concerning the so-called magic bullet found on Kennedy’s stretcher, the audio reports of a second shooter, the alleged involvement of organized crime, the several charges that Fidel Castro or perhaps anti-Castro Cubans killed Kennedy and the omnibus innuendoes of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, which rolled several conspiracy theories into one.
Bugliosi does himself and his argument no favors with his tone of flippancy and dismissiveness, as when he chides conspiracy buffs for failing to admit the possibility that “a nut like Oswald would flip out and commit the act.” Still, this compendium is oddly fascinating, even if it probably won’t change anyone’s mind.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-04525-3
Page Count: 1632
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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