Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
New book on RFK's assassination, May 7, 2008
"RFK Must Die?"Chasing the Mystery of the Robert Kennedy Assassination
By Robert Blair Kaiser
The Preface discloses how Kaiser became involved in the "Sirhan Defense Team" shortly after June 5, 1968, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Kaiser was there on a daily basis, his presence so evident at Mayor Yorty's first press conference, on page 60: " `The Rosicrucians aren't a Communist organization,' I said." Surprised, I said, "Kaiser was there. He just wrote "I said" to the mayor. And then I was with him in a patient, careful telling of the book's subtitle: Chasing the Mystery of the Robert Kennedy Assassination. He took me back with him to 1968 and 1969, day by day, page by page, on each of his interviews -- one-on-one -- with Sirhan, consultations with the psychiatrists, investigations and all the other help he himself gave to the three lawyers defending not the crime, but the rights to a fair trial. Kaiser, while in the story, does not intrude in the telling of the "Mystery," always staying in the background, giving the principals center stage, be they for the prosecution or the defense.
This book has been with me since it arrived from Amazon: on a vacation trip, at the barber shop, waiting in a clinic for tests. I was there in that kitchen at the Ambassador squirming as others wrestled with the diminutive Sirhan, reaching for his hand with the gun, hoping, screaming that someone could bang his hand on the table hard enough to make him drop it before his bullets found Kennedy and five other persons. Before I began reading Chapter 1, though, I read and reread the Appendix containing photocopies of Sirhan's handwritten spiral notebook journal with its repeated phrase over and over "RFK must die!"
The writing is alive, set in the "Now" of "Then." Impressive are Kaiser's knowledge and understanding of what lawyers do, whether prosecuting or defending, his grasp of psychiatry and the law, and his ability as an historian, nurtured in journalism since the early 1960s. He has a unique talent in bringing his readers right into the everyday details of a mystery being told as it happened. This is a fascinating, amazing work of wonder, written in such a way that the reader can't speed through it the way we do with a P.D. James novel, scurrying to get to the end where she tells us who did it, because Kaiser is describing each day or week after June 5, in a slow, careful, wide-awake way that shows he was there. Besides, readers know how the case against Sirhan ended.
And yet and yet I sneaked into Wikipedia to make sure, and found out that his next parole hearing is not until 2012. So, I kept on reading, wondering what was going to happen next, aware that I was back there on a day certain and had to wait for time to unfold. I was being taken along on Kaiser's own work with the defense team of lawyers and doctors and sheriff's assistants, as Sirhan smoked away, while the whole world was asking, "Why? Oh! God! Why?"
Thank you, Robert Blair Kaiser, for writing this book.
|
|
|
6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Weak Facts, May 20, 2008
Well I have a little first hand knowledge regarding A man named Edward Van Antwerp in this book. The author implies he is somehow involved in a conspiracy. I'm sure the author knew better. Edward Van Antwerp was my brother-in-law and nothing could be further from the truth. He was nothing more than a pathetic, drunken loser that was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had been thrown from his family home and by some terrible....really terrible luck, he ended up rooming in a flop house with Sirhan. He was more concerned to learn Sirhan was Homosexual than an assasin.
|
|
|
|
by Shane O'Sullivan
by James W. Douglass
by Turner William
