American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman, and the Shoot-out that Stopped it

الغلاف الأمامي
Simon & Schuster, 2005 - 368 من الصفحات
"American Gunfight" is the fast-paced, definitive, and breathtakingly suspenseful account of an extraordinary historical event -- the attempted assassination of President Harry Truman in 1950 by two Puerto Rican Nationalists and the bloody shoot-out in the streets of Washington, D.C., that saved the president's life.

Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Hunter, the widely admired and bestselling novelist and author of such books as "Havana, Hot Springs," and "Dirty White Boys," and John Bainbridge, Jr., an experienced journalist and lawyer, "American Gunfight" is at once a groundbreaking work of meticulous historical research and the vivid and dramatically told story of an act of terrorism that almost succeeded. They have pieced together, at last, the story of the conspiracy that nearly doomed the president and how a few good men -- ordinary guys who were willing to risk their lives in the line of duty -- stopped it.

It is a book about courage -- on both sides -- and about what politics and devotion to a cause can lead men to do, and about what actually happens, second by second, when a gunfight explodes.

It begins on November 1, 1950, an unseasonably hot afternoon in the sleepy capital. At 2:00 P.M. in his temporary residence at Blair House, the president of the United States takes a nap. At 2:20 P.M., two men approach Blair House from different directions. Oscar Collazo, a respected metal polisher and family man, and Griselio Torresola, an unemployed salesman, don't look dangerous, not in their new suits and hats, not in their calm, purposeful demeanor, not in their slow, unexcited approach. What the three White House policemen and one Secret Service agent cannot guess isthat under each man's coat is a 9mm German automatic pistol and in each head, a dream of assassin's glory.

At point-blank range, Collazo and then Torresola draw and fire and move toward the president of the United States.

Hunter and Bainbridge tell the story of that November day with narrative power and careful attention to detail. They are the first to report on the inner workings of this conspiracy; they examine the forces that led the perpetrators to conceive the plot. The authors also tell the story of the men themselves, from their youth and the worlds in which they grew up to the women they loved and who loved them to the moment the gunfire erupted. Their telling commemorates heroism -- the quiet commitment to duty that in some moments of crisis sees some people through an ordeal, even at the expense of their lives.

من داخل الكتاب

المحتوى

Introduction
3
A Drive Around Washington
5
Griselio Agonistes
12
حقوق النشر

46 من الأقسام الأخرى غير ظاهرة

طبعات أخرى - عرض جميع المقتطفات

عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة

نبذة عن المؤلف (2005)

Stephen Hunter was born on March 25, 1946, in Kansas City, Missouri. He received a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1968. He spent two years in the United States Army as a ceremonial soldier in Washington, D.C., and later wrote for a military paper, the Pentagon News. In 1971, he joined The Baltimore Sun as a copy editor and he became its film critic in 1982. He won the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award in the criticism category in 1998 and the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2003. He is the author of several books including The Master Sniper, The Second Saladin, Dirty White Boys, and Soft Target. He is also the author of the Bob Lee Swagger series and the Earl Swagger series. He has written non-fiction books including Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem, American Gunfight, and Now Playing at the Valencia.

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