Onze site gebruikt cookies om diensten te leveren, prestaties te verbeteren, voor analyse en (indien je niet ingelogd bent) voor advertenties. Door LibraryThing te gebruiken erken je dat je onze Servicevoorwaarden en Privacybeleid gelezen en begrepen hebt. Je gebruik van de site en diensten is onderhevig aan dit beleid en deze voorwaarden.
The mystery surrounding the JFK assassination made this a must-read for me. It feels like largely the same technique that Mailer used for The Executor's Song. Yet the subject is far more elusive despite the author and the research team's best efforts. It is still a very interesting personality and character study of Oswald (particularly concerning the Minsk years), but with so few facts and so much misinformation, very little is ultimately established. At nearly nine-hundred pages, Oswald's Tale is probably only good value to those interested in the event or those that want more of the author's distinctive style. ( )
#unreadshelfproject2019 There were many parts of this tome that I had to skim over. There were so many Russian characters in the first part, I found myself overwhelmed and I really didn't care. The second half of the book is much more interesting. The New Orleans and Texas parts really held my attention. This book is really well written and researched. If you are looking for a super, in depth, looooooonnnnngggg book about Oswald, by all means, this is it. Many other books on Oswald are referenced in this one that may be more concise but still informative. ( )
Long, rambling biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, divided half into his time in Russia, and half in America in the runup to the JFK assassination. The Russian material is more interesting, in the American section Mailer seems less sharp, except for in New Orleans, when Oswald's involvement with the local gay community raises the potential for intrigue. I think his project ran out of steam a bit: he wanted (and admits as much) to uncover a conspiracy but in the end comes to the conclusion there isn't one there. A great turn of phrase when he puts his mind to it, though. ( )
A really good book. I've never really read any of the conspiracy stuff, but this book gave me a good anti-paranoid basis on Oswald's involvement. Nobody knows what happened, of course, but whatever his role, Oswald was no innocent. He loved to play games, to play one person or group against another. He also had a highly inflated sense of self -- he knew he would make his mark on history and wasn't going to give up until he did so. ( )
This was unlike anything I've ever read. Half a dozen times I nearly abandoned it. It's tedious, plodding, dreary, and I knew from the start how the story would end. But it was also fascinating. Mailer attempts to dig into the mind of the man who most of the world is still convinced killed the 35th President of the United States. I was a high school freshman at the time, and I still have vivid memories how the world seemed to stop in its tracks. Mailer's research for the book was very extensive. Besides heavy reliance on the findings of the Warren Commission, Mailer's associates conducted personal interviews with dozens of persons still alive in the late 1980's who knew Oswald. They even tracked down individuals who knew him during his expatriate years in Russia. The resulting portrait is oddly gripping. But the book is a log slog. ( )
To our initial surprises, Mailer rejects conspiracy. According to Oliver Stone’s feverish movie, JFK, the assassination involved practically 50 per cent of the American populace. The unlikelihood of a pan-national cover-up would seem to outweigh the more local lacunae – Oswald’s marksmanship, the ‘magic bullet’, Jack Ruby – which are merely ‘evidentiary’, and subject to the ping-pong of rival advocacies. More crucially, all conspiracies founder on the crags of Oswald’s character, as here established. No concerted effort, however harebrained, could have placed Oswald at its leading edge. Even as a patsy he was unemployable...
Mailer has written some pretty crazy books in his time, but this isn’t one of them. Like its predecessor, Harlot’s Ghost, it is the performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity.
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
REPRESENTATIVE BOGGS. Why did your son defect to Russia?
MARGUERITE OSWALD. I cannot answer that yes or no sir. I am going to go through the whole story or it is no good. And that is what I have been doing for this Commission all day long—giving a story.
REPRESENTATIVE BOGGS. Suppose you just make it very brief.
MARGUERITE OSWALD. I cannot make it brief. I will say I am unable to make it brief. This is my life and my son’s life going down in history.
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
TO NORRIS, MY WIFE, for this book and for the other fourteen that have been written through these warm years, these thirty years and more we have been together.
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
When Valya was three years old, she fell on a hot stove and burned her face and was ill for a whole year, all that year from three to four.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security. If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd.
Thomas Wolfe once remarked that people in the same occupation tend to look alike in all countries - waiters, for example, or taxi-cab drivers. The corollary is that there may be profound similarities of character and function between American intellectuals, writers, and media chiefs and high KGB officers. What wit resides in the cosmos!
For if the seven august men who presided were not trying to blur every possibility but one--that Oswald was a twisted and lonely killer--then one has to assume the opposite: These most accomplished judges, lawyers, and high government officials really did not know how to conduct an inquiry of this sort. As inquiry, the Warren Commission's work resembles a dead whale decomposing on a beach.
It is startling to discover, as one pans these government volumes for bits of gold, how much does gleam in the sludge. One could even make a career as a minimalist writer (of the second rank) by laying out many of the testimonies in two- and three-page narratives.
He had, in fact, lived in so many countries, worked at so many occupations--cavalry officer in the Polish army, lingerie salesman in Belgium, movie-maker in New York, and petroleum engineer in Dallas--and had accumulated so many adventures and married so often (so cynically and so idealistically, sometimes for money, sometimes for love, having once been as wealthy as a gigolo who had hit on double-zero in matrimonial roulette, but reduced by 1962 to living on what Jeanne, his fourth and last wife, was making as a fashion designer at Nieman-Marcus) that boredom could easily have been one of his afflictions: Too much experience can prove as dangerous to maintaining a lively interest in life as too little.
What is insufficiently appreciated about manhood is that it is an achievement, not a gift of gender. To be bold, forthright, competitive, individual, courageous, and innovative does not come as a gratuity that is included with a male infant's penis and scrotum. No, such male qualities have to be earned through brave acts, the honoring of one's private code, and through fierce attachment to one's finest habits.
Our country was built on the expansive imaginations of people who kept dreaming about the lands to the west--many Americans moved into the wild with no more personal wealth than the strength of their imaginations. When the frontier was finally closed, imagination inevitably turned into paranoia (which can be described, after all, as the enforced enclosure of imagination--its artistic form is a scenario) and, lo, there where the westward expansion stopped on the shores of the Pacific grew Hollywood.
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
If it had not been for Theodore Dreiser and his last great work, one would like to have used “An American Tragedy” as the title for this journey through Oswald’s beleaguered life.
Reconstructs the life of Lee Harvey Oswald including the Minsk years, childhood, time in the Marine Corps and the events from 1961-1963.
▾Beschrijvingen bibliotheek
Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden.
▾Beschrijving door LibraryThing leden
Boekbeschrijving
Haiku samenvatting
Nagelaten Bibliotheek: Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer heeft een Nagelaten Bibliotheek. Nagelaten Bibliotheken zijn de persoonlijke bibliotheken van beroemde lezers, ingevoerd door LibraryThing leden uit de Nagelaten Bibliotheken groep.
)
)
)
Google Books — Bezig met laden...
1
