The author of Rush to Judgment, the first book to attack the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of JFK, takes on the CIA's possible role in the murder, by way of Florida jury trial. It was Mark Lane who found a CIA conspiracy behind the Jonestown massacre (he was there) in 1979's The Strongest Poison and FBI complicity in 1977's Code Name ``Zorro'': The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. This time out he offers his most damning version yet of CIA wrongdoing. Lane assembles his evidence with a trial lawyer's cool skill and builds to a riveting climax: an eyewitness account of CIA spy E. Howard Hunt paying off a CIA- backed Cuban assassination team in Dallas the night before the murder and clearly setting up Jack Ruby—before the assassination- -to kill Oswald, the patsy, who never fired a shot. Lane's evidence is drawn from a trial he conducted in Florida in 1978 while defending a small political magazine, Spotlight, which had lost a $650,000 defamation suit brought against it by Hunt. The magazine claimed that Hunt was in Dallas at the time of the assassination while Hunt claimed he was in Washington, D.C. When the appellate court vacated the decision and called for a second trial, Spotlight's owner called in Lane to defend him. Lane saw a case he might well lose, but also his first opportunity ever to cross- examine top figures in Lane's assassination scenario. And indeed he deposes CIA directors Richard Helms and Stansfield Turner, G. Gordon Liddy, Hunt himself—and strikes gold in CIA agent Marita Lorenz, who accompanied two cars full of guns and assassins from Miami to Dallas and, under oath, names all of them, then tells of a follow-up talk with the proud top assassin who pulled off ``the really big one...we killed the president....'' Well-reasoned at every point, Lane's convincing report sounds like the last word on the assassination—but for an alternate scenario, see Mark North's Act of Treason (below).
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1991
ISBN: 1-56025-000-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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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