Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner
Author: Michael M Baden
* JFK's autopsy failed to disclose crucial evidence.
* The deaths of John Belushi and Elvis Presley were far more complex than anyone has let on.
* Decisive medical findings in the von Bulow affair were consistently overlooked.
These are but three of the shocking revelations in Dr. Michael Baden's first-person, no-holds-barred account of his distinguished career in forensic pathology. In determining the causes of tens of thousands of deaths, from those of presidents and rock stars to victims of serial killings, exotic sex rituals, mass disasters, child abuse and drug abuse, Baden has come to the unavoidable conclusion that the search for scientific truth is often sullied by the pressures of expediency. He produces dramatic evidence to demonstrate that political intrigue, influence peddling, and professional incompetence have created a national crisis in forensic medicine.
"A fascinating look into the mechanics of forensics and a disconcerting lesson in the politics of death." — The New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly
The function of medical examiners is to perform pk autopsies and determine causes of death; examiners must be expert in forensic pathology. Baden here ``delivers a sobering indictment of a system in which, he claims, fewer than a thousand physicians nationwide are qualified to conduct this work,'' maintained PW. (May)
Library Journal
Baden, formerly Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, is an angry man with a message. He persuasively argues that medical investigations of unnatural deaths have been hampered by politics, money, position, and religion. Family wishes, political expediency, and actual medical incompetence often make for bungled autopsies or the true cause of death not being disclosed. Using his forensic skills, Baden analyzes some famous cases--John F. Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, John Belushi, and Elvis Presley--as well as many lesser-known but very perplexing ones, sometimes leading to surprising conclusions. Breezily written, this reads like a collection of mystery stories. Recommended.-- Sandra K. Lindheimer, Middlesex Law Lib., Cambridge, Mass.
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Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage
Author: Joseph Persico
Despite all that has already been written on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Persico has uncovered a hitherto overlooked dimension of FDR's wartime leadership: his involvement in intelligence and espionage operations.
Roosevelt's Secret War is crowded with remarkable revelations:
-FDR wanted to bomb Tokyo before Pearl Harbor
-A defector from Hitler's inner circle reported directly to the Oval Office
-Roosevelt knew before any other world leader of Hitler's plan to invade Russia
-Roosevelt and Churchill concealed a disaster costing hundreds of British soldiers' lives in order to protect Ultra, the British codebreaking secret
-An unwitting Japanese diplomat provided the President with a direct pipeline into Hitler's councils
Roosevelt's Secret War also describes how much FDR had been told--before the Holocaust--about the coming fate of Europe's Jews. And Persico also provides a definitive answer to the perennial question Did FDR know in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor?
By temperament and character, no American president was better suited for secret warfare than FDR. He manipulated, compartmentalized, dissembled, and misled, demonstrating a spymaster's talent for intrigue. He once remarked, "I never let my right hand know what my left hand does." Not only did Roosevelt create America's first central intelligence agency, the OSS, under "Wild Bill" Donovan, but he ran spy rings directly from the Oval Office, enlisting well-placed socialite friends.
FDR was also spied against. Roosevelt's Secret War presents evidence that the Soviet Union had a source inside the Roosevelt White House;that British agents fed FDR total fabrications to draw the United States into war; and that Roosevelt, by yielding to Churchill's demand that British scientists be allowed to work on the Manhattan Project, enabled the secrets of the bomb to be stolen. And these are only a few of the scores of revelations in this constantly surprising story of Roosevelt's hidden role in World War II.
Publishers Weekly
Blending anecdotes, speculations and documented facts into an exciting story of collecting and transmitting information in wartime, Persico (Nuremburg: Infamy on Trial) offers a clear-eyed take on FDR's approach to intelligence. For Persico, Roosevelt was someone to whom dissimulation was second nature, and who enjoyed for their own sake the trappings of secret agentry: clandestine meetings, reports done in invisible ink, codes and ciphers. Roosevelt built espionage into the very structure of American government well before Pearl Harbor, Persico shows. The president preferred human sources over electronic ones and the intuition of field agents to the conclusions of technocrats, but he incorporated electronic intelligence comprehensively into strategic and operational planning. Roosevelt's was the decisive influence in creating the Office of Strategic Services. Under "Wild Bill" Donovan, this initially unstable amalgam of dilettantes, poseurs and experts achieved an enviable record of successes during the war. Roosevelt, however, was by no means dominated by his intelligence services. As we see him here, the president listened, processed and drew his own conclusions. He rejected, for example, repeated OSS recommendations to modify the principle of unconditional surrender rather than risk exacerbating Stalin's distrust of the Western alliance, and he respected the Faustian bargain that kept Russia in the war, even in the face of growing evidence that the U.S. was the target of a major Soviet espionage offensive. Such examples are rife throughout the book, showing how Roosevelt's use of intelligence decisively shaped the war and helped define the peace that followed. (On-sale Oct. 9)Forecast: This book should sell solidly to intelligence enthusiasts, but it doesn't connect clearly to any current issues or make major revelations, and is not quite strong enough to create its own buzz. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Philatelist turned President Franklin D. Roosevelt was intrigued by the world and eager to know what other nations were doing. This book keys in on the Machiavellian side of his personality, meshing it with his interest in secrecy. The author of four previous books on espionage and World War II, the biographer of Nelson A. Rockefeller (The Imperial Rockefeller), and the collaborator on Colin Powell's autobiography (My American Journey), Persico is well prepared to tackle the topic of FDR and espionage. While there are no startling revelations, the text covers a fascinating dimension of the American presidency. Persico contrasts FDR's dissembling with Truman's dislike of double-dealing; the latter terminated the OSS only to create the CIA within two years after the start of the Cold War. The author concludes that espionage is, ironically, most successfully used by leaders of free societies. World War II historians and military buffs will welcome this extremely well-written book. Recommended for all libraries. William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A historian argues that FDR's fascination and talent with intelligence helped make him an effective commander-in-chief during WWII. Persico (Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, 1994, etc.) is a Roosevelt partisan, so his text can be tendentious (FDR's decisions are invariably correct, his rare personal failures eminently understandable-and, more forgivable, his talents unsurpassed). But Persico fills a void in WWII histories by focusing on the intelligence aspects of most of the war's major events. He begins, of course, with Pearl Harbor, which he calls "the most stunning failure of intelligence in the country's history, likely in the history of warfare" (the Trojan Horse excepted?). Persico argues forcefully that neither FDR nor Winston Churchill knew of the raid in advance, despite the chain of evidence that suggests they could have. Persico charts the various rises and falls of J. Edgar Hoover and the OSS's William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan (whose successes in espionage were scattered among some daffy proposals-e.g., dropping myriad bats over Japan in the hopes that the winged creatures would terrify the populace). Persico reveals that FDR was convinced that Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi and that Churchill did not conceal any knowledge of an imminent Luftwaffe raid on Coventry to prevent the Nazis from concluding that the British had cracked the German Enigma code. He reminds us that the US rounded up and detained about 20,000 German- and Italian-Americans in addition to the 114,000 Japanese-Americans. He tells the stories of the abortive attempts by the Nazis to land spies in the US-and of the more successful USSR penetration of the Manhattan Project, from which the Soviets stole 10,000pages of information, enough to enable them to construct their own atomic bomb. Persico twice supports FDR's decision to do nothing dramatic to rescue Jews from the Holocaust: winning the war was the best strategy, he says. Persico shines some light on the shadowy activities that helped the Allies achieve some of their most significant victories. (16 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)
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