JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass

Last week I had some issues posting (aka I forgot to hit the publish button until Monday). I will be sure to hit publish this time around. But maybe I shouldn't...JFK and the Unspeakable is a badly written book. How bad? I didn't finish reading it. I try not to review books that I don't finish. I made it a little more than half-way through, but it's been tough. Let me explain.

The material is incredibly interesting. Maybe because I don't know anything about John F. Kennedy. The parts I read covered Kennedy's stance on the Cold War, the CIA, Cuba, and Vietnam. The ending of the book goes through JFK's assassination, which probably is the best part of the book (but I didn't read it). JFK and the Unspeakable is informative and thorough. Too thorough. There's literally 100 pages of citations in the back of the book. The author uses exact quotes to explain things, rather than summarizing.

My other issue is James W. Douglass rambles all the time. Too many times he says he'll discuss that later. Or he provides three sources to prove some minor detail. It becomes infuriating, because I wanted to know what happened and how. If the writing was focused, I feel this could be a great book. Case in point: at the beginning of the book, there is a chronology section of JFK's presidency. I read through it twice, and it was the best part of the book. But my tiff is each bullet/paragraph in the chronology section comes word for word from somewhere in the book. The rest of the book is fluff.

My rating for JFK and the Unspeakable: 1 star out of 5. Get it here!