An engrossing, politically charged accompaniment to a TV event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination.
The companion volume to a forthcoming NBC documentary on the Kennedy assassination.
Investigative TV reporter Russo and prime-time producer Moses collaborated on canvassing a wide range of personalities, including politicians, news correspondents, actors, best-selling authors, photojournalists and widowed spouses. Participants were surveyed with key questions on how the Kennedy shooting impacted life personally and nationally with the resulting essays condensed from hourlong personal interviews, then divided into sections on the event’s location (Dallas), its politics, culture, and the ensuing controversy and speculation. A majority of these anecdotes and recollections are moving and powerful and will greatly fortify the televised coverage of this somber anniversary. Newsman Dan Rather writes that Kennedy’s untimely demise made him a more skeptical reporter, yet the president’s legacy as a whole renewed his sense of patriotism and “love of country.” Marie Tippit, widow to a Dallas policeman caught in Lee Harvey Oswald’s crossfire, reflects painfully on her loss, as do political duo Richard and Doris Kearns Goodwin, who jointly reflect on the unkind fate that befell the Kennedy family. With vivid narration, Robert Grossman recounts the sad, grueling hours he’d spent as one of the attending neurosurgeons searching for signs of life inside the president’s slain body. Former U.S. presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton offer nods to Kennedy’s humanitarian, pro-peace administration, while Pat Buchanan brusquely admits that Kennedy’s presidency was hardly “one of the greats.” Thought-provoking conspiracy theories amplify an already emotionally charged landscape but are soon smoothed over with memories offered by distinguished celebrities Robert DeNiro, Tom Hanks, Jay Leno and Jane Fonda, who fondly refers to the Kennedy clan as being “as close as we’ll ever get to royalty.” The themes of remembrance and appreciation remain constant throughout these pieces—all relevant and compiled with care.
An engrossing, politically charged accompaniment to a TV event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7627-9456-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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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