American Gunfight, Stephen Hunter
American Gunfight, Stephen Hunter
List: $22.50 | Sale: $15.75
Club: $11.25

American Gunfight
The Plot to Kill Harry Truman and the Shoot-Out That Stopped It

Author: Stephen Hunter, John Bainbridge

Narrator: John H. Mayer

Unabridged: 15 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/01/2005


Synopsis

AMERICAN GUNFIGHT is the fast-paced, definitive, and breathtakingly suspenseful account of an extraordinary historical event–the attempted assassination of President Harry Truman in November of 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 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 mean–ordinary guys who were willing to risk their lives in the line of duty–stopped it.

Hunter and Bainbridge 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 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.

About Stephen Hunter

Stephen Hunter has written over twenty novels. The retired chief film critic for The Washington Post, where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, he has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work, American Gunfight. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Al on October 03, 2013

Hunter, best known for his Bob Lee Swagger (from which the movie Shooter was taken) was for many years my go-to Airport book author (I had the idea in my head to mention this even before defFrog's excellent post about airport reads). Unfortunately, I have lost faith in Hunter the last few years (a f......more

Goodreads review by Howard on December 15, 2012

About as thorough a treatment of this incident as one could expect, delving into great depth on intimate background knowledge on all participants. The authors appear to have run down every loose thread. As someone who lived and worked in Latin America for several years, I came away very, very impres......more

Goodreads review by Phil on May 14, 2017

If the subject interests you, find another book. This one is 60% fluff with a back and forth storyline that makes it seem like a bad Tarantino script.......more

Goodreads review by Luke on October 18, 2019

Wow. I'm reading right now. Such an apologist load of crap is chapter 23. I want to put it down. Justifying police action gunning down a parade of unarmed civilians because the CHIDLREN cadets were wearing uniforms and proceeded to march. This after telling them the morning of the parade that their......more

Goodreads review by Rhuff on January 11, 2019

How different the world might have been had these two assassins succeeded in their fanatic mission. The authors' own attempt at imitation-Capote-esque non-fiction dramatization likewise misses at times, resulting in enough obvious padding to stop a bullet on its own. But the larger implications are......more