As he has done before, Maier offers another deft translation of murky American history, focused on dynamic, improbable...
A pulpy, precisely rendered account of the CIA’s dalliance with organized crime in pursuit of Fidel Castro.
Former Newsday investigative reporter Maier (When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys, 2014, etc.) provides fresh eyes and an urgent tone in this unsettling narrative. “Historically,” he writes, “the CIA’s murder plot against Castro marked America’s first foray into the assassination business….The tradition of gentlemen spies engaged in gathering intelligence…had now transformed into the killing games of covert operations, carried out by gangsters and other CIA surrogates.” The author makes his rendition of an oft-referenced tale compelling by focusing on statements by key figures who fought to preserve their secrecy. Maier credits “recently declassified files about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy” for this verisimilitude. The labyrinthine narrative veers from Castro’s 1959 revolution to Watergate and the 1975 Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies. Essentially, CIA go-between Robert Maheu approached Mafia members Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli to pursue assassination plots against Castro. Other CIA officers helped Roselli set up a formidable network of training camps for Cuban exiles in Florida, but their plans were disrupted following the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile crisis. Roselli and others defied Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s ban on further covert action, continuing to scheme assassination plans and commit speedboat raids. Maier focuses on the dramatic personalities of Giancana, the brutal head of Chicago’s Outfit, and Roselli, a suave Hollywood “fixer” who claimed to have taken the CIA’s assignment out of patriotic fervor. The gangsters’ friendship with the Rat Pack provided a back-channel and electoral assistance to JFK, and their disappointment with his presidency would fuel conspiracy theories after his assassination, though Roselli hinted at connections to a vengeful Castro instead. Maier’s writing is approachable (if occasionally repetitive), almost breezy, despite the dark undertones and the violence surrounding Giancana and Roselli, both of whom were murdered in the mid-1970s.
As he has done before, Maier offers another deft translation of murky American history, focused on dynamic, improbable protagonists.Pub Date: April 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-4171-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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