Customer Reviews

American Gunfight

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I had been anxiously looking forward to reading this book since I first saw it on amazon a few months ago. Stephen Hunter is a great author & the perfect person to elucidate the story of the violent attempt on the life of Harry Truman by a pair of desperate Puerto Rican nationalists. This isn't your "usual" assassination attempt with a lone person firing a single gun but a 40-second gun battle pitting a pair of gunmen against the frighteningly casual security arrangements at Blair House where the President was staying. It's an incident that many Americans may have forgotten but it is well worth remembering, if only for the courage of the White House policeman who stopped the more dangerous of the two assassins despite having been mortally wounded himself.

The book starts out very well with little biographies of some of the people involved & a description of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement & some of the events in Puerto Rico that led to the assassination attempt in Washington, DC. Hunter is at his best in this book in describing the people inovlved & in giving enough of a history of the Secret Service, Puerto Rico, etc. without slowing his story down.

Reading this background information, it is easy to get excited about the desription of the gun battle that is coming. Hunter's specialty in his novels is writing about guns & gunfights & the book promises to be both informative & exciting when it gets to the gunfight itself. Unfortunately, when he does get to the gun battle, he falls into a sort of flashback/flash forward style of writing with very brief accounts of the assassination interspersed with more Puerto Rican history & more biographical information. As a result, the story of the actual assassination attempt becomes hard to follow & confusing & Hunter's incessant digressions rob the incident of its inherent interest & tension. He should have gotten the background stuff out of the way & then stayed with the events of the day--I'd have been willing to wait.

Hunter also has a tendency to repeat himself, especially when it comes to his opinions on the effects of being caught in a gunfight & his theories on how police marksmanship training should be conducted. Besides that fact that he tends to harp on these topics, the evidence he brings forth from this particular gun battle is thin. Of course, he may be right about what he says, but this gunfight isn't a good example of what he's trying to say--not to mention the fact that this sort of thing isn't what the book is ostensibly about. At another point, he devotes an entire chapter to a "point of view" description of part of the gunfight through the eyes of the participants. I felt this really fell flat, especially since he was simply repeating things he had just told us about without the fancy pov stylings.

This being said, the book is readable & fairly short so you can get through it in an evening, although it isn't the page-turner I had hoped it would be. And the best thing about reading it is that it will remind you of the good people who stand between people like you (& me) & the monsters of the world. God bless Les Coffelt & his family.

An admirable job of reacquainting us with this event. The hero of the piece displays amazing strength and focus. The parallels to the family men who terrorize us today are sobering. But too much background and some poor editing distract the reader (I've never seen so many exclamation points outside of a middle school).

In a nutshell, this is a compelling story that's essentially ruined by horrible prose. The authors have adopted an almost "Memento"-esque flashback method of telling the backstories of all the personalities featured--no matter how mundane or irrelevant the detail. There's a great deal of repetition of key events and plot points as a result. I could live with this, but what absolutely ruined the book for me was the constant use of past and present tenses interchangeably--often within the same sentence! Additionally, the prose slips from formal to conversational too easily to suit me, though this is far less annoying than the incessant changing of tenses. It made me feel as if I was reading a book that had been hastily cobbled together over a weekend.

The authors introduce one of their interminable flashbacks at one point by saying "this book is about 38.5 seconds of gunfight, however ..." and therein lies the problem. This is undoubtedly a fascinating story, one with which most Americans are probably unfamiliar, and one that definitely deserves to be told. However, it would have read much easier as a 10- or 12-page magazine article; stretching it out into 325 pages really seems unnecessary.

"Americna Gunfight" is a terrific book about the Secret Service heroes who saved Truman's life on 11/1/50...but Floyd Boring was a villain on 11/22/63---see these articles by Vince Palamara:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010210063152/www.njmetronet.com/palamara/boring.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010210062952/www.njmetronet.com/palamara/boring_arrb.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010209041718/www.njmetronet.com/palamara/index1.html
http://jfkassassination.net/parnell/vpal5.txt
http://www.jfklink.com/articles/EmoryRoberts.html

One of the thinks I particularly enjoy about history is its depth. While most people have at least a general familiarity with history, even students of history can always be surprised by in-depth looks at various periods of history. American Gunfight is a great example of this; while I was aware that two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate President Truman in 1950, the details of the incident and the context surrounding it were not covered in any of the other histories of Truman I've read. While that was a logical decision on the part of the authors, as aside from this incident, Puerto Rico was a very small part of Truman's presidency, it left out a fascinating story that illustrates a slice of American history that is often forgotten.

American Gunfight provides a detailed look at the gunfight outside Blair House that left two men dead and three wounded, reviving the memory of American hero Les Coffelt, who almost certainly saved the President's life by killing one of the assassins even as he was bleeding out from three gunshot wounds. But the book goes well beyond the gunfight, branching out to explore the history of the men involved in the battle and the history of Puerto Rican nationalism. The book also takes on some of the common myths regarding the gunfight, in particular the theory that President Truman's life was never in danger.

The book's layout is somewhat distracting. The book jumps from the gunfight to background with each chapter, so the gunfight develops over the course of the entire work rather than being described as a discrete event. While it does serve as a useful means of introducing the characters and events surrounding the gunfight, I found it somewhat annoying. I also disliked the writers' tendency to mix tenses; in the middle of one paragraph they mix past and present with abandon.

Nonetheless, the book is well-researched and easy to read despite the issues I had with it, and I recommend it to anyone interested in President Truman, American history, or history in general.

Great book. A little slow in certain chapters if you aren't interested in the detail that led up to this event, but I was. This book tells the true story of 2 Porto Rican nationals that decided to kill Harry S. Truman. It explains in detail, and I mean in detail, how the plot was conceived, how it was carried out, and the result. It shows how this historical event was poorly planned, poorly executed, and resulted in total disaster. Not just for the would be assassins, but also for the Secret Service agents guarding the president. If the assassins had known a little more about what they were doing they could have been successful, and if the Secret Service had been better prepared they could have stopped it short right at the beginning. The people who researched this event really did their homework. They describe in detail the background and training of each person involved, why they failed or were successful during the assassination attempt, and the things that were learned by the Secret Service as a result of this confrontation. A great story about a real life gunfight. I couldn't put it down.

The subject matter is fascinating, but this book suffers from a wandering and haphazard writing style. Most of all, doesn't anyone edit books anymore? Throughout the narrative the authors repeatedly change tense in the middle of paragraphs, and even in the middle of sentences. If you have any journalistic background it will drive you nuts. What could have been a great story dissolves into a pile of mush. Any decent impartial editor would have cleared this up in a hurry, so perhaps the manuscript was edited by one of the authors... who knows?

I was pointed to this book by a comment made by a writer in a shooting magazine. I have to agree with him in that this book is about as accurate a description of a real gunfight as you can get. Much of what most people see are scenes meant to entertain rather than describe. This book is more of an analysis of the actual 30 plus seconds of the engagement. It splits off and goes into extreme details of the parties involved and the actions culminating in the battle. At times I felt like I really wanted to skip over some of that and get to the final outcome, but I resisted. It also points out the lessons later learned because of the shortcomings encountered in this battle.

I also found that it is a part of history that few people I knew actually knew that these events took place. So it has been an education for myself and some folks around me as well. I think it is well written and does a good job of analysis. It also does a good job of getting into the characters themselves giving insights into the parties surrounding the battle, and their families. I enjoyed it very much.

Perhaps I am being unfair, but I swear I could tell when Stephen Hunter was crafting the prose and when Bainbridge had retrieved an historical nugget sufficiently compelling for inclusion, more than likely concerning the Puerto Rican nationalists attempting the assassination. One moment things are swinging along, then a jarring note - often a repeated description or turn of phrase - and I couldn't wait for Hunter to re-seize the helm. This is a quibble in an otherwise compelling and revelatory revisit to a reporter's first Big Story. In the interim, Hunter has mastered the ability to describe firearm performance and that of the men who wield them, making the "slo-mo" of the actual firefight (mere seconds in duration) intriguing and nuanced in its characterization of those involved. Very nicely done.

This is interesting history but not the Stephen Hunter writing I was expecting. I knew of course it was non-fiction but there is none of Hunter's normally great writing style evident in this documentary. Stephen Hunter and Nelson DeMille are my two favorite fiction authors. If youre looking for classic Hunter dont buy this.