Oswald's Tale : An American Mystery - Softcover

Norman Mailer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349106819 ISBN 13: 9780349106816

Publisher: Abacus, 1996

Synopsis

A work of meticulous research and breathtaking insight, Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery asks the essential question about the Kennedy Assassination: Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? Providing the first full account of his childhood, the years under KGB surveillance in Russia and the events from his return to the United States in 1961 to his death in Dallas. Norman Mailer brilliantly reconstructs the life of this ambitious, doom-laden young man, bringing to the task not only a sober respect for the facts but the power, as America's most distinguished novelist. To invest those facts with vibrant and haunting life.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"MARVELOUS . . . BREATHTAKING."
--The New York Times Book Review
"MAILER SHINES . . . Explaining Kennedy's assassination through the flaws in Oswald's character has been attempted before, notably by Gerald Posner in Case Closed and Don Delillo in Libra. But neither handled Oswald with the kind of dexterity and literary imagination that Mailer here supplies in great force. . . . Oswald's Tale weaves a story not only about Oswald or Kennedy's death but about the culture surrounding the assassination, one that remains replete with miscomprehensions, unraveled threads and lack of resolution: All of which makes Oswald's Tale more true-to-life than any fact-driven treatise could hope to be. . . . Vintage Mailer."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
"FASCINATING . . . A MASTER STORYTELLER . . . Mailer gives us our clearest, deepest view of Oswald yet. . . . Inside three pages you are utterly absorbed."
--Detroit Free Press
"MAILER AT HIS BEST . . . LIVELY AND CONVINCING . . . EXTREMELY
LUCID . . . Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. . . . [He] has found a way to make the dry bones of KGB tapes and his own interviews stand up and perform. . . . From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection."
--Robert Stone
The New York Review of Books
"THIS IS A NARRATIVE OF TREMENDOUS ENERGY AND PANACHE; THE AUTHOR AT THE TOP OF HIS FORM."
--Christopher Hitchens
Financial Times
"Mailer has written some pretty crazy books in his time, but this isn't one of them. Like its predecessor, Harlot's Ghost, it is the performance of an author relishing the force and reach ofhis own acuity."
--Martin Amis
The London Sunday Times

About the Author:

After graduating from Harvard Norman Mailer served in the South Pacific during World War II. He published his first book in 1948 and won the Pulitzer Price twice for THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT and THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG.

About this edition

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0349106819
• ISBN 13: 9780349106816
• Binding: Paperback