True or not, this makes one hell of a story and ties up all the pesky loose ends of events in Dallas 50 years ago. The...
The mob did it.
In this updated, more compact version of his earlier Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination (with Thom Hartmann, 2008), soon to be a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, veteran investigative reporter Waldron (Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, the Mafia, and the CIA, 2012, etc.) fleshes out his argument that Mafia godfathers Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante ordered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Drawing on new interviews and declassified files, the author describes a small, carefully planned conspiracy orchestrated by Louisiana boss Marcello in retaliation for Robert Kennedy’s war on the mob. Building on the 1979 findings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that JFK’s assassination was probably the result of a conspiracy and that Marcello and Trafficante had “the motive, means, and opportunity,” Waldron weaves a complex, highly readable narrative with many disquieting elements. These include Marcello’s meetings with Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby; Marcello’s recorded prison-yard confession to a fellow inmate and FBI informer (“Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did….I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself”); and striking similarities in the behavior of Oswald and designated fall guys in two planned attempts on JFK’s life during earlier motorcade visits in Chicago and Tampa. The author maintains that the godfathers took advantage of a planned U.S.-sponsored coup against Fidel Castro: They killed the president and managed to avoid detection in the subsequent coverup of the secret coup plans. Two European gunmen opened fire at Dealey Plaza, with Oswald as the fall guy, Waldron writes. Jack Ruby’s orders were to find a cop who would kill Oswald or to do it himself, which he did. The book offers much speculation and plenty of instances of “perhaps,” “probably” and “may have.”
True or not, this makes one hell of a story and ties up all the pesky loose ends of events in Dallas 50 years ago. The conspiracy crowd will love it.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61902-226-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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