Wolves, Jackals, and Foxes: The Assassins Who Changed History

Kris Hollingworth's book Wolves, Jackals, and Foxes is a good read about 20th century assassinations. The reading is quick and the stories are told with as light a touch as one can when dealing with the subject matter. The book is episodic; each chapter focuses on a different assassination, and there is no real overarching theme here. Assassins are generally identified by Hollingsworth by motive: political or governmental (wolves), terrorists or power (jackals), or notoriety (foxes). However, the incidents in the book are not grouped into sections. And, despite the categorizations, Hollingsworth doesn't delve much into the psychology of the assassins mentioned or reach any real conclusions; the stories are mostly "this happened, then something else happened." I didn't notice any real political slant as another reviewer found. My favorite installments dealt with an attempted assassination of Harry S. Truman, and the possible assassination of Josef Stalin (it has not been conclusively proven that Lavrenti Beria actually poisoned him). The story about ETA bombers actually watching "Day of the Jackal" together at a theater also had some gallows humor about it. If you can get past the stop-and-go nature of the book, it's a pretty decent read on a very interesting subject.

There is an undercurrent of irony throughout the book, and the author is definitely present in the conversation, i.e., expressing sardonic sense of humor. I found it to be relatively equally distributed across political boundaries, no one escapes the quips.