Overview
This extraordinary and historic book required twenty years to research and write. The oft-challenged findings of the Warren Commission-Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot and killed President John F. Kennedy-are here confirmed beyond all doubt. But Reclaiming History does much more than that. In addition to providing a powerful and unprecedented narrative of events and a biography of the assassin, it confronts and destroys every one of the conspiracy theories that have grown up since the assassination, exposing their selective use of evidence, flawed logic, and outright deceptions. So thoroughly documented, so compellingly lucid in its conclusions, Reclaiming History is, in a sense, the investigation that completes the work of the Warren Commission. In it, Vincent Bugliosi, the nation's foremost prosecutor, takes on the most important murder case in American history.Editorials
Alan Wolfe
To say that Bugliosi wants to strike a nail in the coffin of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists is putting it mildly; he wants to drive a tractor trailer through their ranks and scatter everyone in sight. Is such an effort really necessary? I am afraid it is, which is another way of saying that we ought to be grateful for Bugliosi's obsession.Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed John F. Kennedy. Absent a trial proving his guilt, Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter, has offered the next best thing: a prosecutor's air-tight brief that leaves no reasonable doubt. A short review cannot possibly do justice to the case he assembles, so let me just offer a taste of Bugliosi's methods. The first thing he does is to describe, in exhaustive detail, everything that happened on the day Kennedy was shot. Then, in the second half of the book, Bugliosi takes each of the leading conspiracy theories -- that there was a second Oswald, that the mob plotted the assassination, that the CIA did it and so on -- and demolishes their claims.— The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Bugliosi, best known as Charles Manson's prosecutor, spent more than 20 years writing this defense of the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the slaying of President Kennedy, but his obsession has produced a massive tome that's likely to overwhelm most readers. At times, the author seems determined to present every detail his researches revealed, even if it doesn't add to the overall picture (like a footnote on Elvis sightings). Further, while Bugliosi says even serious conspiracy theorists don't claim the FBI or Secret Service were involved, he devotes chapters to each. The book's structure—it's organized by subject, such as theories about the role of the FBI, the KGB or anti-Castro Cubans—leads to needless repetition, and, for an author who excoriates conspiracy theorists, charging them with carelessness and making wild accusations, Bugliosi is not always temperate in his language; for example, twice he makes the nonsensical claim that some Warren Commission critics "were screaming the word conspiracy before the fatal bullet had come to rest." His decision to devote twice as many pages to critiquing Oliver Stone's movie JFK as to his chapter on organized crime (identified by the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassination as the likely conspirators) is a curious one, as is the choice to open the book with a dramatic re-creation of events surrounding the assassination rather than a straightforward chronology of the relevant facts. Moreover, Bugliosi does not always probe whether individuals who are the sole source for certain facts (for example, Oswald's widow, Marina) had any motive to lie. Bugliosi's voluminous endnotes areon an accompanying CD. Gerald Posner's 1993 Case Closed made most of the same points in a much more concise way. 32 pages of illus. (May)
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