An invaluable personal account that fleshes out history.
Texas Governor John Connally’s wife, who was also in the car when President Kennedy was shot, makes a slender but valid contribution to the assassination story.
Nellie Connally’s eyewitness account is both a poignant personal recollection and a historically interesting record. Aided by veteran coauthor Herskowitz, who collaborated on Connally’s husband’s memoir, In History’s Shadow (1999), she includes all those small details that give recollections immediacy: what she wore (ironically, a pink suit like Jackie’s); what she was thinking about (the dinner the Connallys were to host that night in Austin); and whom she missed (her children, who would be meeting the president at dinner). But Connally was also a politician’s wife who understood the importance of the presidential visit. Texas Democrats were bitterly divided between liberals and conservatives, and though the state was heavily Democratic, it had voted Republican in 1952 and 1956. Many conservative Texans had demonstrated against Democratic political figures, even spitting at native son Lyndon Johnson, and the White House had ostensibly planned this trip to mend political fences. The real reason was more mundane: Kennedy was eager to raise money in the state for his upcoming reelection. Connally describes how well the visit went initially, with enthusiastic crowds sparking her comment as they neared the underpass, “Mr. President, you certainly can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you” (probably the last words Kennedy heard). She recalls the shock of seeing the president and her husband shot, the race to the hospital, and the wait outside with Jackie. John Connally was badly wounded, and his wife feared for his life. As she details his slow recovery, the tight security that surrounded him, and the emotions of those terrible days, the author offers a particularly Texan perspective to the events, expressing the shame she and so many others felt that the assassination had occurred in their state.
An invaluable personal account that fleshes out history.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-59071-014-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Rugged Land
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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
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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