A book that will fuel conspiracy theorists and further blacken Johnson’s legacy.
Linking LBJ to blackmail, intimidation, and even murder.
Mellen (English/Temple Univ.; The Great Game in Cuba: How the CIA Sabotaged its Own Plot to Unseat Fidel Castro, 2013, etc.) chronicles “the dark side of Lyndon Johnson” by investigating two men whom she finds surprisingly absent from Robert A. Caro’s acclaimed four-volume Johnson biography: financier and con man Billie Sol Estes, who accused Johnson of orchestrating multiple murders, and Malcolm Everett "Mac" Wallace, a fellow Texan who the author claims was Johnson’s acolyte. Estes’ scandalous machinations made national news, but Wallace’s service as Johnson’s “hatchet man” is little known. “Wallace’s story is so intriguing,” writes the author, “because, unlike other of Johnson’s acolytes, it is difficult to prove what he did for [LBJ], and what [LBJ], in turn, did for him.” Mellen’s handling of evidence makes her argument disturbing and, in parts, confusing. In mounting her indictment of Johnson as a manipulative, power-hungry politician who considered himself above the law (a portrait that Caro endorses), the author assumes that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. “Circumstantial evidence…is most certainly evidence,” she asserts, and hearsay provokes her interest. Her sources include research into Johnson’s life and politics conducted by reporter Holland McCombs, on assignment for Life; and the files of John Fraser Harrison, a former Dallas reserve police officer obsessed with finding “the Texas roots of the Kennedy assassination.” Besides damning Johnson, Mellen aims to counter Estes’ accusation that Wallace served as Johnson’s hit man and, on Johnson’s orders, was at the Texas School Book Depository when Kennedy was shot. Although she finds “no credible evidence” for either claim, Mellen blows plenty of smoke toward Johnson: “Loose ends, contradictory facts suggesting Lyndon Johnson’s complicity, remain.” She also accuses Johnson of racism (admittedly, not a new claim) and, for reasons of international intrigue, of refusing to rescue sailors on the USS Liberty after it was bombed in 1967.
A book that will fuel conspiracy theorists and further blacken Johnson’s legacy.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62040-806-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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