O’Sullivan’s theories aren’t exactly definitive, but he offers intriguing possibilities in this consistently surprising book.
Richard Nixon. Watergate. The CIA. Cuban burglars. Put them all together, and you have the makings of a story that still resists easy explanation.
Documentary filmmaker O’Sullivan (Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, 2008), whose earlier work has concentrated on the assassinations of Kennedy family members, turns to the role of the intelligence community in the events now collectively known as Watergate. There are many moving parts to his story, beginning with the “October surprise” that won Richard Nixon the presidency in 1968 following “a treasonous plot engineered by key figures in the Republican Party to keep the South Vietnamese government away from the peace talks in Paris,” thus prolonging the war in Vietnam and thwarting Democratic promises to end it. The author, who consulted previously unavailable legal records and recently declassified CIA documents, adds that the go-between was the Chinese-born entrepreneur Anna Chennault, who had deep connections to American intelligence—and who lived in the prestigious Watergate complex. O’Sullivan’s story quickly tangles, and appropriately, in many threads: The U.S. ambassador in Saigon figures, as does E. Howard Hunt, the spy novelist and spook who, over the years, played a role in numerous break-ins at venues such as the Guatemalan Embassy in Mexico City and the Chilean Embassy in Washington. Among the crew was a Cuban-exile CIA operative who may or may not have been a double agent for Fidel Castro, while on the sidelines of the narrative stand players with various links to spy services. Meanwhile, Nixon staffers scamper as the tumult builds after the Watergate burglars are arrested—the police having been tipped off, perhaps, by someone inside the agency. Or was the agency itself behind the bugging of Democratic headquarters? Was it a silent coup on the part of the CIA? And what about those call girls and the ever shadowy Nixon himself? The plot thickens….
O’Sullivan’s theories aren’t exactly definitive, but he offers intriguing possibilities in this consistently surprising book.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-2958-2
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Hot Books/Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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