Certainly no book has ever been published under quite these circumstances. The issues it involves (has history been served? was privacy invaded? were contractual obligations broken?) have already been widely debated. The disputed passages have in part been globally disseminated. And the contents of the book are well known to begin with. Or are they? How many people know that on November 21st Senator Humphrey gave a speech on mental health in Washington in which he said that the act of an unstable person could strike down a great leader? Or that the next morning in Fort Worth President Kennedy quipped that the night before would have been a hell of a night to kill a president? This aggregate of detail, some of it significant, some of it irrelevant (i.e., Eunice Shriver always wears black when pregnant because it is slimming) both intensifies and extends the immediate experience. Mr. Manchester's tremendous research collects and collates who did, said, thought, felt what and where during the November 20th to November 25th timespan. This has the inveterate appeal of private revelations about public people. Then too there's that Establishment word charisma which Kennedy apotheosized. Manchester, one of his acolytes, subdued none of that quality in his over-adulatory Portrait of a President (1962). Here he transfers it to Jacqueline Kennedy, a spotless profile in courage. By comparison, by indirection and sometimes by innuendo the Johnsons come off badly. Dallas and Governor Connally come off worse. Mr. Manchester obviously found the transition from Kennedy to Johnson as trying as did many others of the faithful. The controversial fanfaronade over this book will continue. Historians will question the limber speculations (Oswald was activated by the climate of violence in Dallas, or was it Marina's rejection at 9 P.M. the night before?). But no one should underestimate its impact, however much you may resent it, the unbearable scenes (driver Greer crying, on Mrs. Kennedy's shoulder in Parkland Hospital) right down through the last motorcade to Arlington. Somehow, with no more than reportorial skills at his command, Mr. Manchester matches the dislocation and identification which almost everyone experienced during the tragic events of that long weekend. Inescapably.
Pub Date: April 1, 1967
ISBN: 0883659565
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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