Prescription for Survival: A Doctor's Journey to End Nuclear Madness
Author: Bernard Lown
About the Author:
Bernard Lown, M.D. Cofounder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize
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American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman--and the Shoot-out That Stopped It
Author: Stephen Hunter
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 is that 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.
The Washington Post - Ted Widmer
The definitive history of this attempted murder has now been written by Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge Jr. True to their topic, theirs is an unlikely conspiracy: Hunter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for this newspaper and Bainbridge a journalist and former legal writer in Baltimore. It's a bit unclear what drew them to each other or to this topic, but they attack it with verve.
Publishers Weekly
On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, engaged in a sustained gun battle with Secret Service agents at Blair House. Their goal was to assassinate President Harry Truman. It's curious that the two men haven't found a place in popular memory like other presidential assailants. But this attempt deserves attention because it was explicitly political and because it permanently altered Secret Service practices. Hunter, esteemed for his film criticism and macho adventure novels, teams up with former Baltimore Sun journalist Bainbridge for this richly detailed account of the motives and destinies of virtually everyone connected to the skirmish. This is an ambitious attempt to achieve time-lapse history. The actual confrontation took less than a minute; rather than save it up for the end, the authors spread it across much of the book, interspersed with background material on the participants. The book reads like the product of a film lover/action novelist and a journalist rather than a work of history, with the shootout described in stream-of-consciousness, and melodramatic, cliff-hanging chapter endings. To the authors' credit, though, interpretations are presented as such, and their handling of the recorded events is not only convincing but compelling. Agent, Esther Newberg. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Novelist/film critic Hunter, along with Baltimore Sun journalist Bainbridge, brings cinematic flair to this investigation of the 1950 attempt by Puerto Rican nationalists to assassinate Truman. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Journalists Hunter and Bainbridge reconstruct an attempt on Harry Truman's life, an event that "was of course gigantic news-for about a week."The principal actors in the November 1950 attempt were two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, devotees of a lawyer-revolutionary named Pedro Albizu Campos. The extent of their connection to Campos was not known until long after the attack, yet the operative principle was simple: If any attempt were made on Campos's life in Puerto Rico, then cells would activate in the U.S. and kill Truman. The witness may not have been entirely reliable, and in all events of the assassination effort, there was a certain amount of dumb luck: Truman was staying across the street from the White House, which was being renovated, a fact that a helpful cab driver had to point out to Collazo and Torresola; Collazo had few qualifications apart from a commitment to the cause; much of the attack was concocted on the spot. Yet Torresola was able to shoot several guards and get within ten yards of Truman before being taken down. It all makes for an intrinsically interesting story, but the authors tend to tell everything they can about any particular point of play, layering on incidental details about the lives of D.C. cops and expounding on the history and geography of Puerto Rico while drifting much too often into breathless Dragnet-speak: "The president is in the window he is thirty feet from Griselio who stands unnoticed at the stairway to Lee House the men on the other side haven't noticed him yet he's shot at three men and downed them all the president is thirty feet away and he has a straight line-of-sight picture to that window and therestands the president of the United States so he is very much in the kill zone."Those with patience for run-on sentences may enjoy this long footnote to history.
Table of Contents:
Authors' Note 1Introduction 3
A Drive Around Washington 5
Griselio Agonistes 12
Revolution 18
The Odd Couple 36
Mr. Gonzales and Mr. De Silva Go to Washington 40
Early Morning 50
Baby Starches the Shirts 54
Toad 62
The New Guy 74
The Buick Guy 83
The Guns 86
The Ceremony 100
Indian Summer 104
The Big Walk 109
Oscar 113
"It Did Not Go Off" 128
Pappy 133
The Next Ten Seconds 138
Resurrection Man 141
So Loud, So Fast 152
Upstairs at Blair 156
Downstairs at Blair 161
Borinquen 167
Oscar Alone 181
The End's Run 184
Good Hands 186
The Colossus Rhoads 194
Oscar Goes Down 200
The Second Assault 203
Pimienta 206
Point-Blank 223
The Man Who Loved Guns 228
The Dark Visitors 236
Mortal Danger 240
The Neighbor 243
American Gunfight 244
The Good Samaritan 252
The Policemen's Wives 258
The Scene 260
Inside the Soccer Shoe 267
Who Shot Oscar? 273
The Roundup 278
Taps 286
Oscar on Trial 289
Deep Conspiracy 298
Cressie Does Her Duty 308
Oscar Speaks 310
- R - I - 317
Epilogue: Destinies 323
Source Notes 327
Bibliography 339
Acknowledgments 349
Index 355
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