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Summary: Great lowbrow literature! What a plot!
Review: Just fabulously entertaining. And Elroy has a lot of little known facts about the JFK hit plot right. Comparable to Norman Mailer's "Harlot's Ghost"
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Summary: An American History less sordid than reality......
Review: Ellroy has written one of the most enthralling and entertaining books in recent memory.He truly loves his characters and the world they inhabit. The story moves like a freight train, and rarely lets up.Fictional characters intermingle with real ones. The three main characters are Kemper Boyd, Ward Littel and Pete Bondurant.Three men, all rabid for the same drug - power.The journey they'll take encompasses some of the most incendiary political events and figures of the century.Cuba-the bay of pigs,Bobby and Jack Kennedy,Howard Hughes and J.Edgar Hoover. American Tabloid is without a doubt the most entertaining book i've come across, if you're willing to go with it, to plumb the seedy depths of Ellroy's fervent imagination, then you'll be in for an experience unlike any other.Rumour has it that there'll be a film of this, i sincerely hope not, as good as "LA Confidential" was, it wasn't a pinch on the book.(sorry but it's usually the case with films these days.)I just can't see any film doing this book justice, it's just too darn big!!Read this book!!
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Summary: Historically accurate? Definitely entertaining
Review: I won't vouch for the history here. It's not ever going to be a footnote in a hostory paper, and it was never intended to be. But, I think fans of hard boiled literature will have much to love about the shady sleazy characters in this book. TABLOID's format is similar to LA CONFIDENTIAL's three protagonists - one story format, and I enjoyed that a great deal. If you want to debate history, maybe best stay away. PS: you'll also find Pete Bondurant in a smaller role in White Jazz (I liked it less than American Tabloid)
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Summary: Tight, dirty and crackling with static energy.
Review: This novel tells the story of the years leading up to the Kennedy presidency with such energy and cynicism that it whould be a required read for every college and high school student who studies this time period. The three main characters weave around each other in an elegant but brutal dance. This book is a hardboiled 60's Ragtime. Read it.
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Summary: I was expecting so much.....
Review: When I first picked up American Tabloid I expected the history lesson on the 50's and 60's that I didn't get in high school, instead I got something that is simply unreadable. The characters are exceptional and I found the progression of the plot to be good as well however the style of Ellroy is one that I have to admit I simply couldn't get past. I wanted to love this book but in the end it wouldn't let me.
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Summary: One from the gutter?
Review: What starts off as a moderately amusing synthesis of recent history quickly becomes a nosedive into the ashcan of every discredited paranoia-plot Ellroy can think of. The book reads like he took dictation from the editors at A-Albionic Research: it feels not so much written as manufactured. If you know anything about the facts behind any of the figures Ellroy uses, the words he puts into their mouths seem all the more ludicrous and forced. The biggest thing that keeps this from being suitably mindless entertainment -- and instead makes it a pretentious bore -- is the author's overbearing sense of How Important All This Really Is. His introductory note is tipoff enough. I'm also pretty sure a good novel can be written with a platoon of self-serving scumbags as the main characters, but this isn't it.
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Summary: AWESOME CHARACTERS, BUT CUBA STORY LULLING AT TIMES
Review: I really enjoyed this book at times especially the development and transformation of the characters Ward Littell, Kemper Boyd, and especially "Big Pete" Bondurant. I felt the weakest parts of the story were the excessive parts about the Cadre organization. The Outfit and Kennedy family story lines were more exciting, but I guess you can't write about JFK correctly without the effect of the Bay of Pigs. Clinton could learn a thing or two about how to use the power of the "Executive Branch" from ol' JFK. Littell, Boyd , and Big Pete were my favorites because to see them essentially switch personas by the end of the book was what kept me interested. I never would have guessed who turned out to the Badass connected man and who would have been the sentimental type. Not his best, but worth the ride!
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Summary: The Dark Side of Kill-A-Lot
Review: John F. Kennedy as a Yankee Bill Clinton. J. Edgar Hoover as an American Stalin. And Jimmy Hoffa, Joe Pesci-style. You can't hate a book that gives you these images. James Ellroy's AMERICAN TABLOID is very clever, perhaps too clever for its own good. Parts are intriguing might-have-been history; parts are ridiculously false; parts are out-and-out absurd. And yet, the book entertains, fascinates, and resonates. In portraying America in the Kennedy years, Ellroy chainsaws one of our sacred cows; it's almost as if Seymour Hersch decided to write gleeful trash for "The Enquirer." And yet there are enough anchors in accepted American history to keep the book (almost?) believable. This is not to say that Ellroy has not deviated from established fact; while it's quite funny to assert that the JFK/Marilyn Monroe affair was just a spur-of-the-moment prank on the part of a disgruntled CIA op with a sense of irony, it certainly deviates from reliable scholarship. Such devices are not neccesarily bad; however, like a precocious kid chiding his mom for crying during a film, they tend to remind the reader that the book in hand is, after all, nothing more than an entertaining story. And yet, as such, there is much to like. Ellroy's lightning-fast style is at its best here, the clipped sentences just brusque enough to paint the picture. Too, interesting characters inhabit the multi-layered plot; perhaps most interesting is the "Death Wish"-like transformation of wimp FBI agent Ward Littell into a stone-cold mob lawyer. Historical personages such as JFK, RFK, Hoffa, Hoover, Jack Ruby, and especially Howard Hughes are well-sketched; even if this isn't reality, it's the way many of us would LIKE to picture them. Which brings to mind a might-have-been of my own: the obvious omissions. Besides blowing off Monroe, Ellroy also avoids any mention of Judith Campbell Exner, the death of JFK's infant son, and Lee Harvey Oswald (I was dying to find out how Ellroy intended to portray HIM); too, there are no enduring portraits of LBJ, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or the Cuban Missile Crisis. These are things you might expect the author to have woven into the intricate plot, ESPECIALLY in a book called "American Tabloid." And, as other reviews have mentioned, the ending falls D.O.A. flat. Yet somehow, AMERICAN TABLOID overcomes these flaws, carves out rules of its own, and holds the reader's attention from first page to (disappointing) last, proving positively that Ellroy is not just a crackerjack crime writer; he has artistic fingers on the pulse of the mainstream as well.
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Summary: Love politics, sex, history & violence? Then read this book!
Review: Who was behind JFK's assassination? How was Howard Hughes involved? Did the mafia care about the Bay of Pigs? In this Ellroy masterpiece, he stitches together a compellingly readable bizarro world "that might have happened" from about 1957 to 1963. You can't stop reading 'cause Ellroy's style sucks you in and propels you forward with each jaw-dropping development. Only weakness : the last 30 pages. But you still oughtta read it!
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Summary: Take me to Cuba!
Review: I'm going to Cuba! After reading this superb story about how the evil american empire tried to overthrow the good-hearted Fidel Castro I'm on my way. This book is truly about evil men who don't care about anything but hard cash, probably the true story of the U.S. of A. The demon dog has done it again!
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