Thursday, December 19, 2013

JOHN CHUCKMAN REVIEW OF RICHARD BELZER'S HIT LIST: AN IN-DEPTH INVESTIGATION INTO THE MYSTERIOUS DEATHS OF WITNESSES TO THE JFK ASSASSINATION



If you like books with very little material to read, and much of that repeated two to three times in a page or two, books with great sections of type set in heavy bold or inserted into shaded boxes, all with a generous sprinkling of exclamation marks, and if you like being addressed as “hey, folks” as by a pitchman on an infomercial selling sponge mops and you enjoy photos that seem to have been copied from dingy newspapers, then you will like this book.

The book is sub-titled as an “in-depth investigation,” but as someone with an abiding interest in the Kennedy assassination who has read a good deal of the literature on the subject, I think I can fairly say that this book’s only remarkable quality is that it has nothing new to say: it reflects virtually no research and remarkably little thought. Even its format is unpleasant, much resembling a high school newspaper from some backwater town.

This is the very kind of book which makes those genuinely interested in finding out what happened on November 22, 1963, subject to ridicule. It is simply a shameless grab for dollars, offering readers a chance to reach into a twenty-dollar-or-so grab-bag to discover a plastic toy from the dollar store.