Título: Behind the Scenes: Covering the JFK Assassination
Autor: Darwin Payne
Sinopse: On November 22, 1963, the author of Behind the Scenes was a young Dallas Times Herald reporter who sprinted from his newspaper desk to Dealey Plaza minutes after shots were fired at President John F. Kennedy. Thus began Darwin Payne’s close involvement in covering one shocking event after another on this history-making weekend.
Eyewitnesses he found at Dealey Plaza included Abraham Zapruder, who insisted from the first moments that the president could not have survived the serious wounds he had seen so clearly through his camera viewfinder. Payne interviewed detectives outside the School Book Depository that early afternoon as they brought down evidence of the shooter’s location, as well as his rifle, and he was among several journalists taken to the assassin’s sixth-floor window from where fatal shots had been fired.
Before the day ended, Payne was in the Oak Cliff rooming house where the suspect had been living briefly apart from his Russian wife, Marina. Payne learned that the alleged assassin, now in police custody after being charged with the murder of officer J. D. Tippit, was known as O. H. Lee instead of Lee Harvey Oswald.
On Payne’s regular Saturday night police-beat duty, he was among the growing number of assertive journalists from throughout the nation who saw and heard Oswald being led to and from his jail cell to the homicide office for interrogation. As detectives pushed their way with him through the crowd of reporters, he responded to their questions with defiant claims of innocence. The mind-boggling weekend was still not over, for the next morning nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald.
Contexto da obra
Como livro em inglês, esta obra costuma ganhar também uma camada própria de interesse editorial e linguístico. “Behind the Scenes: Covering the JFK Assassination”, de Darwin Payne, publicado pela editora University of North Texas Press, em 2023 e com 320 páginas, integra a categoria Livros em Inglês. Por isso, o interesse da obra tende a se ampliar quando o leitor considera também a relação com a língua em que ela circula.
Editora: University of North Texas Press
Páginas: 320
Ano: 2023
Edição:
Linguagem: en
ISBN: 1574419110
ISBN13: 9781574419115
Sobre a editora
Os livros da editora University of North Texas Press frequentemente exploram narrativas profundamente enraizadas na história e cultura americana, com especial atenção para o Velho Oeste e suas figuras emblemáticas, além de abordagens detalhadas em artes e música. A leitura costuma ser marcada por uma combinação de rigor documental e riqueza de ilustrações, criando uma experiência que mescla o didático com o visual. Em alguns casos, o tom é mais analítico e acadêmico, como nas investigações sobre batalhas e biografias militares, enquanto em outros há um recorte mais narrativo e até folclórico, como nas histórias de personagens lendários e tradições populares. O catálogo da University of North Texas Press oferece um equilíbrio entre obras que valorizam o detalhamento histórico e aquelas que trazem um olhar mais humano e pessoal, com cartas, relatos e memórias. Essa diversidade permite ao leitor transitar entre textos densos e outros com ritmo mais fluido, sempre com foco em temas culturais e históricos dos Estados Unidos.
