Business

This week’s must-read books

Dallas 1963
by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis  (Twelve)

Among the millions of words written to mark 50 years since the JFK assassination, this book by a pair of Texan writers offers some geographical context. They look at the scene of the crime as a city seething with hatred, bigotry and right-wing extremism. Only a month earlier, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was attacked in Dallas. Posters with Kennedy’s “mug shot” and the words “Wanted for Treason” were all over town, and locals such as ex- Gen. Edwin Walker, oil billionaire H.L. Hunt and others promoted the toxic atmosphere.

Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin Madness, Vengeance, and the Campaign of 1912
by Gerard Helferich  (Lyons Press)

Onetime New York landlord and saloonkeeper John Schrank didn’t manage to join the club that decades later included Lee Harvey Oswald. But put him on the list with the likes of Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley. Schrank took a shot at Teddy Roosevelt after stalking him, following the president’s whistle-stop tour around the country. The gunman believed, Roosevelt had a hand in President McKinley’s murder in 1901 and that his campaign for a third term was an abuse of power. A fast-paced look at a little-remembered piece of history.

Hitler’s Furies German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields
by Wendy Lower (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

It may not come as a big surprise that in Hitler’s Germany, men weren’t the only Nazis, but many think of women Nazis as taking on the subservient roles of housekeeping and child-rearing. Now Holocaust-expert Lower explains that the “women’s work” of the Holocaust was often as bloody as that of the men: Pauline Kneissler, a nurse in a Berlin asylum, chose patients for Hitler’s “Euthanasia” program. Pregnant Vera Wohlauf cheerfully joined her SS officer husband on massacres in the Ukraine. When Erma Petri found six Jewish children on her husband’s new Polish estate, she shot them herself.

Solo A James Bond Novel
by William Boyd  (Harper)

In following post-Ian Fleming Bond writers such as Kinglsey Amis and Jeffrey Deaver, Boyd (“A Good Man in Africa”) tosses readers a few curves in his first 007 outing. Boyd’s Bond enjoys his eggs scrambled instead of boiled, and he’s driving a Jensen. Set in the 1969, much of this adventure’s action is in the fictional African country of Zanzarim — an oil-rich land where Bond goes to stop a brutal civil war. We get exotic locales, political intrigue and sexy women. What could be bad?

Going Down
by Chris Campanioni  (Aignos Publishing)

A writer, teacher, actor and model, in his debut novel, Campanioni draws from his experiences to bring readers along for a ride from NYC’s fashion runways and TV studios to a mysterious disappearance in Rio and a film premiere in Cannes. Cuba, New Jersey and a mulitmillion-dollar clothing heist also figure into the story of Chris Selden, who, when we meet him, is a writer for Newark’s Star-Ledger.