Levelheaded and informative: a former FBI agent on the whodunit of the century. Hosty earned unwanted notoriety as the man who was in touch with Oswald before the Kennedy assassination. It was a routine part of a heavy caseload, but it opened the door for Hosty's scapegoating by the FBI, the Dallas police, and the media. Thirty years later we benefit: A straightforward mind inured to the ways of bureaucracies has thought long and hard on the subject of the assassination and the way its investigation was handled. Hosty's book is full of acute character sketches (including a painfully dazed Allen Dulles) and summations of interoffice and interagency politics. It is also a portrait of a man whose life in post- Eisenhower America—his ranch house on a 12-home street that boasted 55 kids—was a sort of regular-guy idyll. Hosty's vision of this world, of Hoover's button-down, byzantine FBI, of a lost America, has an unvarnished Rotarian grace and an unexpected richness. An experienced and skeptical investigator, Hosty soft- pedals his take on who was responsible, but offers this: Marina Oswald fit the FBI's criteria for ``sleeper'' KGB agents, and Oswald's meeting of her is somewhat similar to that of an obscure young American who defected to Russia and then decided to return, only to be offered a convenient wife by the KGB. Castro knew about Oswald's intentions, even if he didn't incite them. Oswald's pre- assassination visit to Mexico City included a meeting with a representative of the KGB's Division 13, which handled terrorism and assassination. Hosty has a shoe-leather reasonableness; his perspective is unique. Oddly resonant and affecting, Hosty's contribution to assassination literature is minor but rock-solid: a must-read for buffs. Watch official America play CYA.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55970-311-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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