Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery is a 1995 non-fiction book by Norman Mailer, ISBN 0-679-42535-7. It amounts to a detailed biography of Lee Harvey Oswald (1939–1963), the assassin of US President John F. Kennedy.
Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery is a 1995 non-fiction book by Norman Mailer, ISBN 0-679-42535-7. It amounts to a detailed biography of Lee Harvey Oswald (1939–1963), the assassin of US President John F. Kennedy.
The book includes an exhaustive examination of Oswald's movements over the years, and particularly in the months, leading up to Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, and Oswald's own death two days later. Knitted into the story of Oswald's life are Mailer's suppositions on his state of mind and motivations. The Oswald that Mailer depicts is a single-minded and vain individual convinced of his own destiny and importance who suffers a series of defeats and frustrations, and who killed the President in a desperate search for achievement.
When Oswald returns to Dallas in 1963 with his wife and daughter, he still has dreams, still sees himself as "an instrument of history," and is still frustrated and unhappy. His April 1963 assassination attempt on General Edwin Walker, a John Birch Society supporter, shows him acting out his belief that he is an instrument of history in the months leading up to November 22, 1963.
Six months after the assassination attempt on Walker, Oswald takes advantage of the accident of history that has brought the JFK motorcade past the window of the Depository where he works, and he acts out his self-declared destiny.
Kirkus Reviews wrote: "Combining the tedious and the sublime in quintessential Mailer fashion, the text reconstructs Oswald the cipher and pawn, replacing him with Oswald the ideological aspirant with an almost occult belief in his destiny. Judicious, painstaking, and imaginative, this should be a central book in a growing and undependable canon." [1] Publishers Weekly said Mailer's "unconvincing analysis emerges from a labyrinthine pastiche of KGB and FBI transcripts, recorded dialogues, speculations, Oswald's letters and diary excerpts, and government memos." [2] Giving the book a grade of "B", L.S. Klepp of Entertainment Weekly wrote that Mailer "makes Oswald a deeper, more imposing figure than he has seemed to be. It doesn’t work. Yet the book that Mailer has poised on this flawed premise is still full of interest." [3]
Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times described Oswald's Tale as a "long-winded and ultimately superfluous book". [4] According to Kakutani: "Mr. Mailer declines to use his enormous gifts as a reporter and novelist to create an unvarnished portrait of his subject (the way he did with Gary Gilmore in his 1979 masterpiece, The Executioner's Song ), but instead clumsily tries to force his material into an unyielding cookie-cutter shape. The result is a book that succeeds simultaneously in being boring and presumptuous, derivative and solipsistic." [4] She also wrote: "Mr. Mailer willfully veers even further into the realm of imaginative fancy than Don DeLillo did in his powerful 1988 Oswald novel Libra ." [4] Also writing for the New York Times, Thomas Powers described the work as "marvelous". [5] Powers writes, "All of this is described wonderfully well. Mailer's account adds many new characters and incidents to the story told by Ms. McMillan, but it is also distinguished by a brilliant linguistic invention, a kind of Mailer-patent Russian-English that captures Russian rhythms not only of language but also of thinking and feeling about love, work and the ways of the world." [5]
Libra is a 1988 novel by Don DeLillo that describes the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and his participation in a fictional CIA conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. The novel blends historical fact with fictional supposition.
Marina Nikolayevna Oswald Porter is the Russian-American widow of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of US President John F. Kennedy.
Arthur Phillips is an American novelist. His books include Prague (2002), The Egyptologist (2004), Angelica (2007), The Song Is You (2009), The Tragedy of Arthur (2011), and The King at the Edge of the World (2020).
Independence Day is a 1995 novel by Richard Ford and the sequel to Ford's 1986 novel The Sportswriter. This novel is the second in what is now a four-part series, the first being The Sportswriter. It was followed by The Lay of the Land (2006) and Let Me Be Frank With You (2014). Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1996, becoming the first novel ever to win both awards in a single year.
Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Black Dogs is a 1992 novel by the British author Ian McEwan. It concerns the aftermath of the Nazi era in Europe, and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s affected those who once saw Communism as a way forward for society. The main characters travel to France, where they encounter disturbing residues of Nazism still at large in the French countryside. Critical reception was polarized.
Ilona Marita Lorenz was a German woman who had an affair with Fidel Castro in 1959 and in January 1960 was involved in an assassination attempt by the CIA on Castro's life.
Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy is a book by attorney Vincent Bugliosi that analyzes the events surrounding the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy, focusing on the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. He drew from many sources, including the Warren Report. Bugliosi argues that the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy is correct. The book won the 2008 Edgar Award for the Best Fact Crime category. Bugliosi explored the issues at length; the book is 1,632 pages. It was published with an accompanying CD-ROM containing an additional 1,000+ pages of footnotes. He analyzed both the assassination itself and the rise of the conspiracy theories about the event in the following years.
Douglas Anthony Cooper is a Canadian writer.
Race Matters is a social sciences book by Cornel West. The book was first published on April 1, 1993 by Beacon Press. The book analyzes moral authority and racial debates concerning skin color in the United States. The book questions matters of economics and politics, as well as ethical issues and spirituality, and also addresses the crisis in black American leadership.
John Hagy Davis was an American author who wrote several books on the Bouvier and Kennedy families and on the Mafia, both the Sicilian Mafia and its Italian-American offshoot.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is the debut non-fiction book by American author David Grann. The book was published in 2009 and recounts the activities of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon while looking for an ancient lost city. For decades explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of his party and of the "Lost City of Z".
Amnesia is a 1994 novel by Douglas Anthony Cooper and is his debut novel. The book was published in March 1994 by Hyperion Books and is the first entry in the Izzy Darlow series.
John M. Newman is an American author and retired major in the United States Army. Newman was on the faculty at the University of Maryland from 1995 to 2012, and has been a Political Science professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia since January 2013.
Robert Hilburn is an American pop music critic, author, and radio host. As critic and music editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1970 to 2005, his reviews, essays and profiles appeared in publications around the world. Hilburn has since written a memoir and best-selling biographies of Johnny Cash and Paul Simon. He was a member of the nominating committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for more than 20 years and lives in Los Angeles.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is a book of short stories and a novella by the American writer George Saunders. Published in 1996, it was Saunders's first book. Many of the stories initially appeared in different forms in various magazines, including Kenyon Review, Harper's, The New Yorker and Quarterly West. The collection was listed as a Notable Book of 1996 by The New York Times, as well as a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award.
Stephen Grosz is a psychoanalyst and author.
Roger Hobbs was an American writer. He was the author of Ghostman and Vanishing Games. In 2011, Hobbs sold the adaptation rights to his crime fiction Ghostman to Warner Brothers. In 2014, Hobbs was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author. Roger Hobbs died of a drug overdose in Portland, Oregon, on November 14, 2016.
Innocent, published in 2010, is a novel by Scott Turow which continues the story of the antagonistic relationship between ex-prosecutor Rožat "Rusty" Sabich and Tommasino "Tommy" Molto as a direct follow-up to his 1987 debut novel, Presumed Innocent. Sabich, now chief judge of the Court of Appeals, is indicted by Molto for the murder of Sabich's wife Barbara; Alejandro "Sandy" Stern returns to defend Sabich. The novel was adapted into a television drama of the same name, starring Bill Pullman as Sabich, which first aired on TNT in November 2011.
The Book of Colour is a novel by British author Julia Blackburn, published in 1995 by Pantheon Books. Blackburn's first novel, the book was praised by critics and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.
