Customer Reviews

The Book of Assassins: A Biographical Dictionary from Ancient Times to the Present

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Not many books in a dictionary format are enjoyable to read. For me, this book was one of those few, wonderful exceptions. The information is concise, and most entries list references and other source material for those who are interested to persue. I have to rate it lower than I would like (3 instead of 4) just due to the numerous typos that exist throughout. Hopefully these will be cleaned up in another revision, as nonfiction works are hurt more by these grammatical errors than fiction items.

A reference guide to assassins is an excellent idea, but this work does not live up to what can be a very intriguing book. It is printed on cheap production paper with no illustrations. Most of the entries are one page. A plus is that there are many obscure figures included that most readers have never heard of, but there is scant info on them whereas Lee Harvey Oswald, about whom most people already know plenty, has 9 pages. One other plus is that each entry includes a list of further references so, if readers are intrigued by a specific assassin's tale, they have at least one source to go to for more info. There is also an index on the victims in the back. Shop around for the best deal on this book and it will probably be worth it for anyone interested in assassins.

Useful for unbiased details

Fetherling, George, 2001 Kaplan, Fanny. The Book of Assassins: A Biographical Dictionary from Ancient Times to the Present. Wiley ISBN-10 0471158917; ISBN-13: 978-0471158912

This book is most useful for its historic details, for instance if one wants to recall "which Somoza was killed where" this is a handy place to find out. Fetherling is careful to thread his way through the morass that surrounds President Kennedy's death exploring the most likely possibilities including, as so many authors omit, that Fidel Castro may well have been involved. The reason for this review was I needed such a handbook to thread my way through a Cuban government sanctioned volume trying to distinguish probable fact from propaganda. In the Cuban book, while discussing the life of Stalinist master spy "Fabio Grobart" (the Castro's brothers' "maestro") the author had maligned Fanny Kaplan the woman who shot, and eventually, long after she was executed, killed Lenin. The Fetherling book provided me with a carefully researched account of very troubled Fanny, and thus by its balanced presentation of fact, provided me with a most apt illustration of Cuban government propaganda to use in my manuscript in progress "Narrations of War in Cuba."