The Interloper

August 12, 2013
Unlike previous accounts of the man who assassinated Kennedy, which focus on whether he acted alone, journalist Savodnik here delivers a genuine biography that emphasizes the nearly three years Oswald spent in the Soviet Union and attempts to address the oft-neglected question of why he wanted to kill the President. A mildly rebellious youth whose mother never provided a stable home, Oswald joined the Marines at age 17—his service was undistinguished and men in his squadron considered him odd because he was already expressing pro-communist views. Soon after discharge, he traveled to Moscow where he requested Soviet citizenship; suspicious authorities dithered for months before assigning him a factory job in Minsk. Oswald made friends and enjoyed success with women who considered him exotic, but he became bored and dissatisfied. His marriage to Marina Prosakoba briefly improved matters, though he soon resumed efforts to return home, passing the last year and a half of his life growing increasingly irascible. Savodnik’s impressive research—which includes many Russian sources—does not turn up any revelations, but it paints an intriguing portrait of a restless, tormented soul who accomplished little in a short life until he turned himself into an infamous historical figure. Agent: Ted Weinstein, Ted Weinstein Literary Management.

September 1, 2013
A journalist's sure-footed probing into Lee Harvey Oswald's three years in Russia finds an unsettling time of retrenchment and rage. Why did Oswald shoot President John F. Kennedy? That, writes journalist Savodnik, remains the key question--not whether the gunman had any accomplices. The author believes Oswald acted alone and was essentially fulfilling an inescapable channeling of estrangement that found expression, after his failed Russian experiment, in sharpshooting and assassination. Largely peripatetic and homeless, never fitting in anywhere, thanks to a dysfunctional home life, absent dad and erratic mother, Oswald eventually gravitated toward the Marines in 1956 in order to escape his mother. The regimen did not suit him, since essentially he was unschooled and undisciplined, and his vague yearnings toward Marxism were naive and unformed. Still, he managed to force the hand of the Soviet Union when he tried to defect, then attempted suicide to garner sympathy for his cause; incredibly, Russia allowed him to stay and even gave him a job and apartment in Minsk, thus endowing this inconsequential transient with something like heroic status. Even women found the outsider attractive, something he never had experienced before, although most of his co-workers at the Experimental Department in the Minsk Radio Factory kept their distance from the rather too-clean, meek former American. Savodnik gamely looks at the various friendships Oswald made, surely all of them monitored by the KGB, as his resolve to stay began to crumble after a year and some months. He recognized that he would not find a home in Russia as he had hoped--another in a long series of "interloping" failures. Oswald's dissatisfaction would fatally seize on something, somewhere, soon. An oddly intimate foray into the life of this most banal specimen of evil.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2013

Savodnik, a journalist who has reported from Russia, peels back the layers of conspiracy chatter surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald and investigates the man himself by focusing on his time in the Soviet Union (1959-62). Savodnik's contention is that Oswald's sojourn there was his last best hope for finding stability in his erratic life. When he defected to Russia at 19 after leaving the marines, he wanted to take part in a Marxist revolution, but the Soviets--who, as Savodnik points out, wanted their own stability after decades of war and Stalinism--never granted Oswald citizenship and kept a close eye on him. The book effectively details how Oswald, sent to a factory job in Minsk, and overseen by the KGB, after a spell of enjoying popularity as an American boyfriend to local women, became alienated, married Marina Prusakova in a mutual act of desperation, and returned with her to the States. This was emblematic of his patterns of unhappiness and drastic impulse. In the States he further destabilized, which led to tragic consequences. VERDICT This work complements Gerald Posner's Case Closed, which also sees Oswald as the lone--and loner--assassin, as well as Priscilla Johnson McMillan's Marina and Lee, which takes a more personal and Marina-focused approach. Recommended for all who remain fascinated by Oswald, the Kennedy assassination, Cold War narratives, or infamous criminals. [Marina and Lee has been reissued with a new introduction by the author.--Ed.]--Jacob Sherman, Texas A&M Univ. Lib., San Antonio

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2013
A lot of people, Savodnik points out, have spent a lot of time speculating about whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President John F. Kennedy. Very little time, on the other hand, has been spent in examining Oswald as a man. Savodnik begins with the assumption, for which he later offers plenty of evidence, that Oswald acted alone, and he devotes his time to exploring the reasons why this 24-year-old assassinated an American president. His focus is on Oswald's years in the Soviet Unionhis reasons for going there, his disillusionment (Russia, it turned out, wasn't a workers' paradise), and his state of mind when he returned to the U.S. in 1962. Savodnik busts a few myths along the way; for example, pointing out that the notion that the Russians would use Oswald as a Manchurian Candidatestyle programmed assassin is absurd. But his real interest lies in presenting a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald the man, not merely the murderer. A very welcome addition to the voluminous literature about the Kennedy assassination.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)