Books and Book Reviews: "JFK and the Unspeakable" by James Douglass

Book Review:


Huffington Post July 24, 2009

"JFK and the Unspeakable" by James Douglass

by Oliver Stone, the Award-winning filmmaker


Posted: July 23, 2009 05:05 PM

The murder of President Kennedy was a seminal event for me and for millions of Americans. It changed the course of history. It was a crushing blow to our country and to millions of people around the world. It put an abrupt end to a period of a misunderstood idealism, akin to the spirit of 1989 when the Soviet bloc to began to thaw and 2008, when our new American President was fairly elected.

Today, more than 45 years later, profound doubts persist about how President Kennedy was killed and why. My film JFK was a metaphor for all those doubts, suspicions and unanswered questions. Now an extraordinary new book offers the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance. That book is James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It is a book that deserves the attention of all Americans; it is one of those rare books that, by helping us understand our history, has the power to change it.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/oliver-stone/jfk-and-the-unspeakable_b_243924.html

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Memoirs of Anthony Blunt, British Spy, Made Public - NYTimes.com, July 24, 2009

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: July 23, 2009

CAMBRIDGE, England — After keeping it sealed in a steel container for 25 years, the British Library made public on Thursday a 30,000-word memoir in which Anthony Blunt, one of Britain’s most renowned 20th-century art historians, described spying for the Soviet Union, beginning in the mid-1930s, as “the biggest mistake of my life.”
The memoir offers few new insights into the details of Blunt’s spying, about which he said little in public before he died in 1983. Its main interest, according to historians, lies in Blunt’s account of his recruitment by another Soviet spy, Guy Burgess, when both were at Cambridge University in the 1930s, and in his exposition of his motives and feelings, including his disillusionment with Marxism and the Soviet Union after World War II.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/world/europe/24blunt.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

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