Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££
Brothers: The hidden history of the Kennedy years David Talbot London: Simon and Schuster, 2007, h/b, £20 Another Kennedy book? Yes, but a good one. Talbot may not have anything new of substance to tell us about the assassination per se but has much new material about events before and after it. Talbot’s JFK … Read more
Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££
A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency Richard Helms and William Hood (New York: Random House, 2003) The Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby John Prados Oxford University Press: Cary [North Carolina], 2003 The Man Who Kept the Secrets Thomas Powers (New York: Knopf: 1979) Honorable … Read more
Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££
William Blum New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002, $15 www.softskull.com The working lives of writers, especially writers of non-fiction like Blum – or me – are rather dull. To produce Lobster and my other bits and pieces I have to stay in one place, read e-mails every day, books, newspapers, visit libraries, go to … Read more
Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££
The big switch Keeping track of the developments in the JFK assassination is something like a full-time job and I don’t have the time. Plodding along years behind the buffs, I came across Walt Brown’s Treachery in Dallas (Carroll and Graf, New York, 1995), an interesting book, dotted with new (to me) bits and pieces. … Read more
Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££
Ken Silverstein Verso, London (£19.00) and New York ($25.00), 2000 Ken Silverstein is co-editor of CounterPunch, a very good radical – left radical – newsletter in Washington (http://www. counterpunch.org/). This book is a group of essays centred round a central theme rather than an attempt to encompass the whole area of the relationship between the … Read more
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££
John Armstrong Arlington, Texas: Quasar Ltd., 2003 $40, plus postage, from <www.jfkresearch.com/armstrong/> This is a major publishing event in the JFK assassination world. Parts of Armstrong’s work has been on the Net and he’s spoken at some of the big JFK conferences. His work-in-progress became spoken of as ‘the John Armstrong research’; and finally … Read more
Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££
Political activist Daniel Ellsberg and Professor Alfred McCoy have something special in common. Based on their actions and accomplishments of nearly thirty years ago, they have achieved the status of icons within the subculture of what passes for the New Left. Icon Ellsberg became a celebrity in 1971 after he leaked The Pentagon Papers, an … Read more
Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££
Hernando Calvo Ospina Translated by Stephen Wilkinson and Alasdair Holden London and Sterling,VA.: Pluto Press, 2002, pb, £10.99 This is the first book to document the on-going attempt by the Bacardi company to both help overthrow the Fidelista Cuban Government and sabotage the commercial interests of competing, Cuban-sourced, rum companies. It also documents the … Read more
Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997) £££
Portland Free Press Portland Free Press, edited by Ace R. Hayes, with the legend ‘Tell the Truth and Run’ on its masthead, contains to produce important parapolitical material. The January/February issue had an extract from the 1991 deposition of Richard Brenneke, a pilot who claims to have flown missions for the Contras (which has not … Read more