As a JFK assassination buff, I have read several long books about the JFK assassination. However, there is a new book out there that I seriously doubt I will read. This 1632 page long addition to the mass of JFK assassination books is called Reclaiming History and brought to you by the author of Helter Skelter. The New York Times book review is a hilarious account of how long the book is.

The reviewer of the book mentions that some of the length comes from the over-the-top coverage of the topic, which he claims is required because of the fact that the public wasn’t satiated by the Warren Commission report. As I mentioned in my last post, I simply don’t think more exacting coverage will help in this case. People can’t make things add up when something like this happens.

The reviewer also compares Oswald’s age to that of the Virginia Tech shooter, but I think there is also a comparison of the two tragedies in terms of acceptance. People try to find some way to balance the scales when something horrible happens. In the case of the Virginia Tech shooter, they look to blame the school administration, the gun shop, gun control legislation, violent video games, or whatever else comes to mind. Bruce Schneier sort of mentions how silly this blame game is in his latest article on Wired.

The bottom line is that in life, there are things that don’t add up. Humans aren’t good at dealing with incredibly rare or seemingly impossible realities. There’s a similar argument made for randomness. Steven Levy covered this well with respect to the iPod and it’s shuffle feature. Being able to take a step back from things and understand that the human reaction you might have to something like the JFK assassination is important to being able to accept it.