11-11-13
The Five Best Kennedy Assassination Books
Roundup: Historians' Taketags: JFK, JFK assassination, Kennedys
November 22 is of course the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. I haven’t read all 1,000 books about it, but I have five favorites:
Don DeLillo, Libra
“We will build theories that gleam like jade idols,” says DeLillo’s
surrogate, a CIA historian writing the secret history of Dallas. “We
will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy
the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams.” In the novel, two CIA
veterans of the Bay of Pigs seek to arouse anti-Cuban sentiment by
organizing an assassination attempt by a Castro supporter. But in their
plan, the assassin—with an identity “made out of ordinary pocket
litter”—will miss. DeLillo, as John Leonard wrote in The Nation, “is an agnostic about reality.”
Stephen King, 11/22/63
When Jake steps thru the secret passage in Al’s Diner in Maine, it
takes him back to 1958; can he stick around and change the course of
history by stopping Oswald before November 22, 1963? And what if he
discovers that the conspiracy theorists were right, and JFK was shot by
someone else? Eight hundred and fifty wonderful pages of time travel
romance and adventure in a world where the food tastes better and the
music is more fun—and where history itself resists change, with all its
might....
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