Marina and Lee

Praise

“This classic of the JFK assassination literature . . . unfolds like a Russian novel with an American ending, a tale of galling social constraints, claustrophobic relationships and thwarted ambitions that birth a monstrous drive for self-assertion. Oswald is the most vivid of many sharply etched characters—arrogant, grandiose, calculating but feckless, his narcissism fed by Marxist dogma and Cold War paranoia, seizing a chance to shoot his way from failure to fame.” —Publishers  Weekly

“More than three decades after its initial publication, Marina and Lee remains the single best book ever written about the Kennedy assassination. No one has managed to weave the psychological, political and fateful strands of this crime with the power and perspicacity displayed here by Priscilla McMillan. This is a book that will leave you deeply shaken and continually haunted.” —Thomas Mallon, author of Mrs. Paine’s Garage and A Book of One’s Own

“McMillan achieves with art what the Warren Commission failed to do with its report. She makes us see . . . It is not at all easy to describe the power of Marina and Lee . . . It is far better than any other book about Kennedy . . . Other books about the Kennedy assassination are all smoke and no fire. Marina and Lee burns.” —New York Times Book Review
 
“Because Priscilla McMillan is a superb narrator and a superior scholar, her book has all the power of a first-class novel, and all the austerity of excellent scholarship. It is even more than that. It answers . . . the questions: Did Lee Harvey Oswald murder John Kennedy, was he alone in the act, and why did he do it? . . . The answers are all there, and they all make sense.” —Chicago Tribune 
 
“McMillan has done us the service of pointing out just how deeply the enemy lives within us. One closes her book pondering the odds that America has a sociological victim like Oswald on every block. Compared to this, the conspiracy question looks incidental. The question is not how many assassins can dance on the head of a pin, but what makes one dance, given a particularly ugly set of human circumstances at birth?” —The New Republic
 
“Fully as persuasive as the conspiracy lore that has preceded it…[McMillan] has a novelist’s sense of when to dramatize, through dialogue and the use of exact detail, the crucial twists and turns of domestic life . . . Priscilla McMillan’s extraordinary book makes the necessary and subtle connection between private frailties and their power to change the history of the world.” —The Atlantic Monthly
 
“Richly detailed and absorbing….Marina and Lee may be the closest we will ever get to understanding the mind of John F. Kennedy’s assassin.” —Newsday
 
“Not likely to be surpassed . . . a compelling story told with a mature authority.  Without detracting from the horror of the act, it forces us to confront the human face of the assassin.” —New York Post