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American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman--and the Shoot-out that Stopped It Hardcover – October 25, 2005

3.7 out of 5 stars 83 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster (October 25, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0743260686
  • ISBN-13: 978-0743260688
  • Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (83 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #489,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
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.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
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).
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Format: Hardcover
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.
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Format: Hardcover
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.
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