Awards

• Short-listed for APA The Audies: Achievement in Abridgement 2007
• Shortlisted for APA The Audies: Achievement in Abridgement 2007.
• Winner of Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award 2008

Overview

At 1:00 p.m. on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead, the victim of a sniper attack during his motorcade through Dallas. That may be the only fact generally agreed upon in the vast literature spawned by the assassination. National polls reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans (75%) believe that there was a high-level conspiracy behind Lee Harvey Oswald. Many even believe that Oswald was entirely innocent. In this continuously absorbing, powerful, ground-breaking book, Vincent Bugliosi shows how we have come to believe such lies about an event that changed the course of history. The brilliant prosecutor of Charles Manson and the man who forged an iron-clad case of circumstantial guilt around O. J. Simpson in his best-selling Outrage Bugliosi is perhaps the only man in America capable of writing the definitive book on the Kennedy assassination. This is an achievement that has for years seemed beyond reach. No one imagined that such a book would ever be written: a single volume that once and for all resolves, beyond any reasonable doubt, every lingering question as to what happened in Dallas and who was responsible. There have been hundreds of books about the assassination, but there has never been a book that covers the entire case, including addressing every piece of evidence and each and every conspiracy theory, and the facts, or alleged facts, on which they are based. In this monumental work, the author has raised scholarship on the assassination to a new and final level, one that far surpasses all other books on the subject. It adds resonance, depth, and closure to the admirable work of the Warren Commission. Reclaiming History is a narrative compendium of fact, forensic evidence, reexamination of key witnesses, and common sense. Every detail and nuance is accounted for, every conspiracy theory revealed as a fraud on the American public. Bugliosi's irresistible logic, command of the evidence, and ability to draw startling inferences shed fresh light on this American nightmare. At last it all makes sense.

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9780393045253

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Reviews

This is quite simply a book that will be read for centuries. -- Scott Turow, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Presumed Innocent At last, someone has done it, put all the pieces together. With this work, Bugliosi has definitively explained the murder that recalibrated modern America. It is a book for the ages. -- Jim Newton - Los Angeles Times Book Review This encyclopedic work is a bargain. Mr. Bugliosi's verve for setting the record straight is unequaled and will probably never be surpassed...Unlike any other book on the assassination ever produced by a single author, Reclaiming History [should] probably be shelved along-side the two massive federal investigations of the assassination. -- Wall Street Journal Absent a trial proving [Oswald's] guilt, Bugliosi has offered the next best thing: a prosecutor's air-tight brief that leaves no reasonable doubt. Bugliosi is right that this case is, and ought to be, closed. -- Alan Wolfe - Washington Post Reclaiming History is the final word on the Kennedy assassination. It sets out to recapture the assassination from the conspiracy theorists, and succeeds so triumphantly that only the most demented reader could doubt its conclusions. -- Telegraph (London) What Bugliosi has done is a public service. This book should be applauded...More than a critical analysis...[it] is the literary equivalent of World War I, a kind of trench warfare for the mind. -- Bryan Burrough - New York Times Book Review Few books are as gripping in their narrative, or as telling in their fine detail. This is a book that will make you weep. Powerfully, Reclaiming History evokes the confusion and awful fatefulness, a feeling of the world ripped asunder, that gripped millions at the time. -- Philadelphia Inquirer With indignation crackling on every page...Bugliosi aims to redress, once and for all, what he sees as an outrageous imbalance between the books that deal with the assassination responsibly and those that do not... [Bugliosi's] richly textured book is as engrossing as it is convincing. -- Boston Globe

With indignation crackling on every page...Bugliosi aims to redress, once and for all, what he sees as an outrageous imbalance between the books that deal with the assassination responsibly and those that do not.... [Bugliosi's] richly textured book is as engrossing as it is convincing.

This is quite simply a book that will be read for centuries. -- Scott Turow, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Presumed Innocent At last, someone has done it, put all the pieces together. With this work, Bugliosi has definitively explained the murder that recalibrated modern America. It is a book for the ages. -- Jim Newton - Los Angeles Times Book Review This encyclopedic work is a bargain. Mr. Bugliosi's verve for setting the record straight is unequaled and will probably never be surpassed...Unlike any other book on the assassination ever produced by a single author, Reclaiming History [should] probably be shelved along-side the two massive federal investigations of the assassination. -- Wall Street Journal Absent a trial proving [Oswald's] guilt, Bugliosi has offered the next best thing: a prosecutor's air-tight brief that leaves no reasonable doubt. Bugliosi is right that this case is, and ought to be, closed. -- Alan Wolfe - Washington Post Reclaiming History is the final word on the Kennedy assassination. It sets out to recapture the assassination from the conspiracy theorists, and succeeds so triumphantly that only the most demented reader could doubt its conclusions. -- Telegraph (London) What Bugliosi has done is a public service. This book should be applauded....More than a critical analysis...[it] is the literary equivalent of World War I, a kind of trench warfare for the mind. -- Bryan Burrough - New York Times Book Review Few books are as gripping in their narrative, or as telling in their fine detail. This is a book that will make you weep. Powerfully, Reclaiming History evokes the confusion and awful fatefulness, a feeling of the world ripped asunder, that gripped millions at the time. -- Philadelphia Inquirer With indignation crackling on every page...Bugliosi aims to redress, once and for all, what he sees as an outrageous imbalance between the books that deal with the assassination responsibly and those that do not.... [Bugliosi's] richly textured book is as engrossing as it is convincing. -- Boston Globe

Manson Family prosecutor Bugliosi (Helter Skelter, 1974, etc.) takes on the endless and various host of JFK conspiracy buffs in this ponderous tome.By the author's count, there are nearly 350 organizations and individuals who have been implicated in the conspiracy theories swirling around the president's murder on November 22, 1963. Most of the buffs advancing them, he growls, are as kooky as a three-dollar bill in their beliefs and paranoia about the assassination, and he has a point; one multi-conspiracy advocate, reminded that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had not been named as a party in the assassination and cover-up, replied, Give us time. The point of this metropolitan phone book - sized volume, it seems, is to dismantle those theories one by one, in sometimes tedious and overladen detail; but given the multiplicity of those theories and the evidence required to dispel them, it is hard to imagine that the book or approach could have been much different. Perhaps the most pervasive argument - apart from the overarching one that Lee Harvey Oswald could not, for various reasons, have acted alone - is that the Warren Commission deliberately acted to suppress evidence of conspiracy, to which one counsel tells Bugliosi, The one thing I wanted to do was find a conspiracy . If I could have found that Oswald didn't do it, I'd have been the senator from Ohio, not John Glenn. In turn, Bugliosi examines and then dismisses theories concerning the so-called magic bullet found on Kennedy's stretcher, the audio reports of a second shooter, the alleged involvement of organized crime, the several charges that Fidel Castro or perhaps anti-Castro Cubans killed Kennedy and the omnibus innuendoes of Oliver Stone's film JFK, which rolled several conspiracy theories into one.Bugliosi does himself and his argument no favors with his tone of flippancy and dismissiveness, as when he chides conspiracy buffs for failing to admit the possibility that a nut like Oswald would flip out and commit the act. Still, this compendium is oddly fascinating, even if it probably won't change anyone's mind. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Vincent Bugliosi (1934-2015), was the prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of Helter Skelter, Outrage, and other #1 best-selling books.

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