Three days in Dallas

Despite Bugliosi's grandiose title, his book does not purport to unlock any secrets or advance a new thesis. In fact, Bugliosi says the Warren Commission had it right in September 1964, when it released its 888-page report on the assassination: Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy by himself. So one must ask what purpose yet another book about the assassination could possibly serve.

With indignation crackling on every page of "Reclaiming History," Bugliosi aims to redress, once and for all, what he sees as an outrageous imbalance between the books that deal with the assassination responsibly and those that do not. In the latter category he puts the 95 percent of JFK-assassination books contending that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill Kennedy or that others conspired with him to do it.

Polls show at least three-fourths of Americans believe there was a conspiracy. Bugliosi attributes that perception to the outpouring by conspiracy theorists of "drivel, misinformation, and flat-out fabrications." He adds that Oliver Stone has greatly compounded the travesty by chiming in with his "loathsome and reprehensible" movie "JFK."

Hence, Bugliosi says, his goal is "to expose, as never before, the conspiracy theorists and the abject worthlessness of all their allegations."

A longtime prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bugliosi has authored best-selling books about the Charles Manson and O. J. Simpson murder cases. Now he brings his law-enforcement expertise to bear on the JFK murder case. He has worked on the book, on and off, since 1986, when he presented the prosecution's case against Oswald in a mock trial that aired on British television.

He has produced a meticulously documented, 1,612-page tome (it also comes with a CD-ROM containing another 954 pages of endnotes) of such heft that it ought to include carpentry blueprints for reinforcing the shelves of the bookstores that stock it.

When Bugliosi's storytelling skills click in -- as they do, for example, when he is profiling Oswald and Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who gunned him down at police headquarters -- his richly textured work is as engrossing as it is convincing.