Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION ELL | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination--in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . . Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . . Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . . Where three renegade law-enforcement officers--a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents--are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . . James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Author Notes
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L. A. Quartet novels - "The Black Dahlia", "The Big Nowhere", "L. A. Confidential", & "White Jazz" - were international best-sellers. His novel "American Tabloid" was Time magazine's Novel of the Year for 1995; his memoir, "My Dark Places", was a "Time" Best Book of the Year & a "New Yorker Times" Notable Book for 1996. He lives in Kansas City.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Although it follows his L.A. Trilogy chronologically, Ellroy's visceral, tightly plotted new novel unfolds on a much wider stage, delivering a compelling and detailed view of the American underworld from the late 1950s to the assassination of JFK. Demythologizing the Camelot years, Ellroy (White Jazz) depicts a nexus of renegade government agencies, mobsters, industrial tycoons and Hollywood players fueling the rise and fall of the Kennedy administration. The story hinges on the entanglements of three 40-something government mercenaries who play major, behind-the-scenes roles in such events as the Bay of Pigs and the assassination of the president. Suave and sybaritic Kemper Boyd pimps for JFK while carrying out simultaneous undercover work for the CIA, FBI, Robert Kennedy and the Mob. Hulking, sadistic ex-L.A. cop Pete Bondurant, a hired killer for Jimmy Hoffa, digs dirt for a drug-addled Howard Hughes while training a cadre of bloodthirsty, anti-Castro Cuban exiles off the Florida Coast. Idealistic FBI wiretapper Ward Littel, following a series of disastrous anti-Mafia operations, becomes a Machiavellian mob lawyer. All three rub shoulders with an enormous cast of real-life characters, including clever, two-dimensional portraits of the Kennedy family, J. Edgar Hoover and Jack Ruby. Exercising his muscular, shorthand prose, Ellroy moves the narrative from break-in to lurid assignation to brutal hit job in a tightening gyre that culminates in the murder of the president. While not especially convincing as revisionist history, this is a cool and riveting evocation of a cultural epoch abounding in government surveillance, endemic corruption and yellow journalism. BOMC and QPB selections; author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Patrons who discovered Ellroy's jaundiced noir on the screen in L.A. Confidential may want to check out his take on the JFK assassination. As in Ellroy's L.A. novels, rogue cops--here, two FBI agents and an ex-L.A. cop turned CIA agent--are at the center of the action, which also involves Jack and Bobby Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and multiple mobsters and anti-Castro Cubans in a pursuit of power that ends in a dance of death.
Kirkus Review
It's the Kennedys versus Jimmy Hoffa, Fidel Castro, and J. Edgar Hoover in this blistering, sprawling slice of Americana from the comic-book Dos Passos of our time. Jack Kennedy only wants to be president and keep getting laid; his brother Bobby, who burns with a more gemlike flame, wants to expose the mob's ties to the Teamsters' Pension Fund; Hoover wants to keep the FBI focused on American Communism rather than organized crime. As they grapple for power before and after the 1960 election, Ellroy focuses on three scoundrels caught in their conflicts. FBI agent Kemper C. Boyd becomes Hoover's man on the inside of the McClellan Committee, which Robert Kennedy's spearheading to get indictments on the mob; Boyd then allows himself to get drafted by a CIA officer who wants him to organize an anti-Castro insurgency force trained by a KKK alumnus. Boyd's friend Ward J. Littell, an FBI undercover op, vaults to the top of the Bureau ladder before a feud puts him on a collision course with Hoover. And Pete Bondurant drifts away from his regular job (procuring women and dope for Howard Hughes) to emerge as the CIA's stalwart Chicago Phantom. None of Ellroy's fictional characters, though, is the equal of his powerful, paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, the unmoved mover whose hand and voice are everywhere, even though he never appears in person. It's Hoover whose kiss-off of Ward Littell turns him into a pathetically loose cannon, and Hoover whose obsession with Castro seems to turn his coup into a godsend for the rest of the cast, providing everybody with a common scapegoat. But the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Bobby Kennedy's renewed crusade against organized crime at home, shatters the principals' fragile alliances, and they're left plotting to shake down the sexually insatiable president. Ellroy reins in the more flagrant stylistic excesses of his L.A. Quartet (White Jazz, 1992, etc.), but indulges every overripe subplot you can imagine, in this lurid, volcanic historical epic. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections; author tour)
Library Journal Review
Critics either adored or abhorred Ellroy's last crime novel, White Jazz, for its gritty subject matter and "word jazz" prose. American Tabloid, a fictional examination of the conspiracy-to-end-all-conspiracies-the assassination of JFK -will contain more of the same. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
