American Tabloid

Banger of a book great novel and wonderful writing. Please for the love of Pete make it a movie and cast good gritty people please

James Ellroy’s novel about the lead-up to the Kennedy assassination is a reading experience, and not a relaxing one. His style is sharp and telegraphic, searing brutal images into the reader’s mind. Those images illuminate an underworld of corruption, duplicity, and intrigue where top crime fighters ally with organized crime leaders when they have mutual interests and common enemies. The story introduces many fictional characters, some amalgams of real people, to render a version of events depicting the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco and the subsequent fallout. All of this lays the groundwork for what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The three main characters, Pete Bondurant, Kemper Boyd, and Ward Littel, do dirty work for powerful men. Bondurant, a one-time bodyguard of Howard Hughes, is employed to dig up dirt on John F. Kennedy to hurt his chances in the campaign. Hughes owns a magazine that he intends to feed salacious stories about Kennedy, and he feels Bondurant is the right man to helm the effort. Boyd is an FBI agent directed by J. Edgar Hoover to infiltrate Bobby Kennedy’s McClellan committee. The Committee’s function is to root out racketeering crime. Littel, also an FBI agent and a friend of Boyd’s, agrees to help him. Little is given a position on the Top Hoodlum Squad ostensibly to gather intelligence on organized crime. Each of the three agents enlists his group of snitches, and their assignments begin to devolve into leaks of information and double-crosses of their employers. As their jobs heat up, the three men work together, work against each other, and eliminate anyone who gets in their way. Bondurant, Boyd, and Little are used by the FBI, the CIA, and the Mafia. When Kennedy becomes President and Castro seizes Cuba, Cuban exiles are trained for a Cuban invasion. Bondurant leads this effort. The CIA uses agents to run heroin to block Castro’s drug-running enterprise. Bondurant also is involved in this. How Bondurant, Boyd, and Littel manage to juggle their assignments and stay alive while eliminating obstacles to their mission of the moment will make your head spin. The story is riveting, believable, and shocking. It was challenging for me to separate fact from fiction. Ellroy’s sentences are short and sharp. Most paragraphs are two sentences long. Brutal scenes of beatings, murders, and torture are standard. I grew weary of the novel about halfway through, but I did manage to finish. The problem for me was the high level of intensity over almost 600 pages without relief. I admire what Ellroy has accomplished, but I would not recommend the book to everyone. Those most likely to enjoy it would be those interested in Kennedy assassination theories and who don’t cringe at over-the-top violence.

I knew where Ellroy stood on the matter from the snap. The first line of his apology for this book told me what I was in for. "America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets." What follows is nearly 600 pages of scrapping the scum off the shoes of the American story, told in the staccato hammer throws of a Tommy Gun writer. Ellroy is indeed the master of the short sentence, and there is no finer display of his talent than in this book. Ellory knows how to embrace bad men for a fleeting second, to make them glimmer with a dram of purpose larger than their own appetites. But the moment flashes by, and they return like demented dogs to their own vomit. There are no decent characters in this story (except maybe RFK. I'll get to him), none you would bring home to meet your Mama for Sunday night dinner. JFK is a decadent sexaholic, J.E. Hoover is an American Machiavelli whose only interest is to stay in power, the main characters, Bondurant is an ex-cop who is now nothing more than pimp to power, Littel is an idealistic FBI agent who turns to the dark side once his illusions of a just world are destroyed. And Boyd Kemper, what to say about a man who is so well connected with all the seats of power of the underhanded and the underworld--he works at times for the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, the Kennedy's, and rubs shoulders with the Outfit--all for a cause. For his own purposes, he craves the patina of royalty he sees in the Kennedys. Underneath, he's nothing but a talented wannabe who plays all sides in the power games, keeping secrets, trading secrets for favors, working for justice in one city while destroying it another. A more duplicitous character does not exist in all literature outside of the Borgia popes. And these are the heroes of Ellroy's story. I gave this book five stars for a couple of reasons, one is not for his vision of America as a cesspool of dirty tricks in the name of sex, power, and money. What Ellory does accomplish is connect the dots of an era and make sense of it--if you want to believe that sense--but it is believable in his telling. There are many victims in this story, not least of which are the American people. But RFK is the single primary victim of this story, more so than the naive Cuban exiles who were cut down on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. They were nothing but pawns in Dulles's private war on world leaders he didn't like. In this book you will read of the marriage of criminals and cops to foment a revolution that made no sense, that the people didn't even appear to want. That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? What was the purpose of this invasion of Cuba sponsored by the CIA and underwritten by the Outfit's dope pedaling to blacks and Cubans? It was nothing more than an effort to restore the criminals to their casinos camouflaged by a blinding hatred of commies puffing on big stoggies just 90 miles off our shore. Fidel is blowing smoke in our faces, and the powers that be cannot abide his arrogance. It was a fiasco mission from the get go with little hope of success unless they can manipulate the new president into doing something foolish. Which he doesn't do, sealing his fate. So now we come at last to RFK. He's a Kennedy, so he's not immune to a dirty trick or two, but he has been bitten by the bug of justice. He believes that Jimmy Hoffa is the worst criminal in America and has to be brought down. He believes the mafia exists and must be expunged. He believes hoodlums have to be brought to account, but he can't find the evidence to prove his point. Until one day it shows up. That scene reminded me of when Oedipus learned the truth. The truth he had fought against all of his life, the curse that had dogged him, that he had killed his father and married his mother. He cried and then did other things, none of which I will bring up here. The man in our story sheds a tear. He has decency. He has a moment of regret that he is a Kennedy--maybe. I don't know. How can one regret such things? From here it is all conjecture. This is all I'm going to say. I need to go take a shower now and wash away the remnants of this tragedy. What I will not do is retreat into reading Amish Romances. I don't hold to Ellory's theory of American turned rotten. There is no doubt the rotten, but there are also good men and women who have built the legacy of the America most of us live in. That's all I'm going to say--for now.

I love this book. I’ve read all his books but this is the best. It is a bit dated meaning I would think if your like 60 or older you could really appywhat he’s say. Also this is a mans book in my opinion. He is a bit nasty and vulgar at times. Also this was a gift. I read this book years ago. Actually 2 times Last point. I would describe this book as Ray Donavan on steroids. If you get my meaning

Heard some college prof/author raving about this book on NPR a couple of months ago. Had just finished the (insipidly sentimental, overwritten, too long by half and ultimately moronic) Steven King doorstop about the late 50s and Kennedy Assassination. Had read LA Confidential years ago so knew Ellroy would provide a cleansing counterbalance to King's cloying version of the era. Consider me cleansed. Washed out, even. Ellroy's guys (and it's almost all guys) exist in a world with no moral order. They are who they are, so they do what they do without reflection or regret. The plot is convoluted, complicated and completely consistent with the time and the characters. Ellroy makes the violence (and it's really violent) arise almost organically. I fell into this book so far that the characters would infect my dreams. Hammett, Cain, Jim Thompson; add whomever from the noir writers all time list you'd like, but put Ellroy there too. And if you like them, read this. For me, I'm not sure I have the nerve to download The Cold Six Thousand yet.

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.

This was the selected book for our Guy's Bourbon and Book Club. There is nothing wrong with the book if you like Film Lit Noir style of writing/dialog: the narrator speaks like an ole-timey gangster (with a LOT more cursing). Or, if you're really into JFK assassination conspiracy stuff, you'd probably like it as well. LA Confidential (same writer) is an exceptional movie. This would be too. Just found the narrative voice way too difficult to get into while reading. I made it 100 pages in then gave up.

FBI/CIA/Mafia types threaten, bribe, beat and kill a swath through the historical scandals leading up to the election of Jack Fitzgerald Kennedy and until his demise. In other reviews of this book, much has been made of the clipped writing style that James Ellroy used for this novel. Suffice it to say that the technique's novelty did not wear out before I got to the last page, but I don't know if I could handle reading a second novel written in this fashion. The characters are so hard boiled that you could hammer nails with them, and Ellroy renders historical characters in such a breezy, freewheeling manner that it feels as though one might walk through your door in the next minute. Not that you'd want to spend any personal time with these violent sleazeballs. Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Santos Traficante, RFK and J. Edgar Hoover spring vividly to life, and no peccadillo is too taboo for Ellroy's characters to ruminate over as they jostle back and forth between the historical interludes, rendered as secret agency memos and headlines, which serve as bookends for each chapter. You don't so much as identify with these characters, as you do identify against them and root for their demise. The only sympathetic character is Lenny the homosexual lounge act and mob/upper-crust hang around, and that's stretching it, since he's a lowlife, too. You might need a shower or two after reading this thing.

è arrivato in ritardo ma a parte questo il prodotto è perfetto, la qualità del libro è quella descritta nell'annuncio

AMERICAN TABLOID se lo recomiendo a todo el mundo, fácil de leer y muy bien escrito ME ENCANTO. VIVA JAMES ELLROY.

Did not really get the appeal of this book. To call it pulp fiction is a disgrace to that genre. Hacks type gibberish. People waste time reading it. If you found this review confusing, the book is worse.

What a book, loved LA Confidential and this book delivers a hard hitting thriller that really draws you in!

This is my second read insider ten years, and it is great novel; it will go down in time as one of the greatest alt history crime novels ever. A masterpiece.