--- product_id: 18028827 title: "American Tabloid" price: "Rp711015" currency: IDR in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.id/products/18028827-american-tabloid store_origin: ID region: Indonesia --- # Classic Literature Timeless Style Cultural Icon American Tabloid **Price:** Rp711015 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Summary > 📖 Relive the Past, One Page at a Time! ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** American Tabloid - **How much does it cost?** Rp711015 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.id](https://www.desertcart.id/products/18028827-american-tabloid) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Key Features - • **Collector's Item:** A must-have for any serious literature enthusiast. - • **Vintage Aesthetic:** Perfect for adding a touch of nostalgia to your bookshelf. - • **Engaging Narrative:** Captivating prose that keeps you on the edge of your seat. - • **Cultural Commentary:** A thought-provoking exploration of society and politics. - • **Uncover Hidden Stories:** Dive into the gritty underbelly of American history. ## Overview American Tabloid is a vintage literary masterpiece that delves into the complexities of American culture and politics, offering readers a gripping narrative filled with intrigue and historical significance. ## Description The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination--in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . . Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . . Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . . Where three renegade law-enforcement officers--a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents--are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . . James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open. Review: Great entertaining gritty read - Banger of a book great novel and wonderful writing. Please for the love of Pete make it a movie and cast good gritty people please Review: Violent novel about events leading to Kennedy assassination - James Ellroy’s novel about the lead-up to the Kennedy assassination is a reading experience, and not a relaxing one. His style is sharp and telegraphic, searing brutal images into the reader’s mind. Those images illuminate an underworld of corruption, duplicity, and intrigue where top crime fighters ally with organized crime leaders when they have mutual interests and common enemies. The story introduces many fictional characters, some amalgams of real people, to render a version of events depicting the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco and the subsequent fallout. All of this lays the groundwork for what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The three main characters, Pete Bondurant, Kemper Boyd, and Ward Littel, do dirty work for powerful men. Bondurant, a one-time bodyguard of Howard Hughes, is employed to dig up dirt on John F. Kennedy to hurt his chances in the campaign. Hughes owns a magazine that he intends to feed salacious stories about Kennedy, and he feels Bondurant is the right man to helm the effort. Boyd is an FBI agent directed by J. Edgar Hoover to infiltrate Bobby Kennedy’s McClellan committee. The Committee’s function is to root out racketeering crime. Littel, also an FBI agent and a friend of Boyd’s, agrees to help him. Little is given a position on the Top Hoodlum Squad ostensibly to gather intelligence on organized crime. Each of the three agents enlists his group of snitches, and their assignments begin to devolve into leaks of information and double-crosses of their employers. As their jobs heat up, the three men work together, work against each other, and eliminate anyone who gets in their way. Bondurant, Boyd, and Little are used by the FBI, the CIA, and the Mafia. When Kennedy becomes President and Castro seizes Cuba, Cuban exiles are trained for a Cuban invasion. Bondurant leads this effort. The CIA uses agents to run heroin to block Castro’s drug-running enterprise. Bondurant also is involved in this. How Bondurant, Boyd, and Littel manage to juggle their assignments and stay alive while eliminating obstacles to their mission of the moment will make your head spin. The story is riveting, believable, and shocking. It was challenging for me to separate fact from fiction. Ellroy’s sentences are short and sharp. Most paragraphs are two sentences long. Brutal scenes of beatings, murders, and torture are standard. I grew weary of the novel about halfway through, but I did manage to finish. The problem for me was the high level of intensity over almost 600 pages without relief. I admire what Ellroy has accomplished, but I would not recommend the book to everyone. Those most likely to enjoy it would be those interested in Kennedy assassination theories and who don’t cringe at over-the-top violence. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #59,505 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #160 in Hard-Boiled Mystery #2,683 in Literary Fiction (Books) #3,408 in Suspense Thrillers | | Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 2,693 Reviews | ## Images ![American Tabloid - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71epMchmXUL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great entertaining gritty read *by L***Y on December 5, 2025* Banger of a book great novel and wonderful writing. Please for the love of Pete make it a movie and cast good gritty people please ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Violent novel about events leading to Kennedy assassination *by K***Y on November 2, 2021* James Ellroy’s novel about the lead-up to the Kennedy assassination is a reading experience, and not a relaxing one. His style is sharp and telegraphic, searing brutal images into the reader’s mind. Those images illuminate an underworld of corruption, duplicity, and intrigue where top crime fighters ally with organized crime leaders when they have mutual interests and common enemies. The story introduces many fictional characters, some amalgams of real people, to render a version of events depicting the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco and the subsequent fallout. All of this lays the groundwork for what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The three main characters, Pete Bondurant, Kemper Boyd, and Ward Littel, do dirty work for powerful men. Bondurant, a one-time bodyguard of Howard Hughes, is employed to dig up dirt on John F. Kennedy to hurt his chances in the campaign. Hughes owns a magazine that he intends to feed salacious stories about Kennedy, and he feels Bondurant is the right man to helm the effort. Boyd is an FBI agent directed by J. Edgar Hoover to infiltrate Bobby Kennedy’s McClellan committee. The Committee’s function is to root out racketeering crime. Littel, also an FBI agent and a friend of Boyd’s, agrees to help him. Little is given a position on the Top Hoodlum Squad ostensibly to gather intelligence on organized crime. Each of the three agents enlists his group of snitches, and their assignments begin to devolve into leaks of information and double-crosses of their employers. As their jobs heat up, the three men work together, work against each other, and eliminate anyone who gets in their way. Bondurant, Boyd, and Little are used by the FBI, the CIA, and the Mafia. When Kennedy becomes President and Castro seizes Cuba, Cuban exiles are trained for a Cuban invasion. Bondurant leads this effort. The CIA uses agents to run heroin to block Castro’s drug-running enterprise. Bondurant also is involved in this. How Bondurant, Boyd, and Littel manage to juggle their assignments and stay alive while eliminating obstacles to their mission of the moment will make your head spin. The story is riveting, believable, and shocking. It was challenging for me to separate fact from fiction. Ellroy’s sentences are short and sharp. Most paragraphs are two sentences long. Brutal scenes of beatings, murders, and torture are standard. I grew weary of the novel about halfway through, but I did manage to finish. The problem for me was the high level of intensity over almost 600 pages without relief. I admire what Ellroy has accomplished, but I would not recommend the book to everyone. Those most likely to enjoy it would be those interested in Kennedy assassination theories and who don’t cringe at over-the-top violence. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Modern Day Tragedy *by J***E on March 24, 2020* I knew where Ellroy stood on the matter from the snap. The first line of his apology for this book told me what I was in for. "America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets." What follows is nearly 600 pages of scrapping the scum off the shoes of the American story, told in the staccato hammer throws of a Tommy Gun writer. Ellroy is indeed the master of the short sentence, and there is no finer display of his talent than in this book. Ellory knows how to embrace bad men for a fleeting second, to make them glimmer with a dram of purpose larger than their own appetites. But the moment flashes by, and they return like demented dogs to their own vomit. There are no decent characters in this story (except maybe RFK. I'll get to him), none you would bring home to meet your Mama for Sunday night dinner. JFK is a decadent sexaholic, J.E. Hoover is an American Machiavelli whose only interest is to stay in power, the main characters, Bondurant is an ex-cop who is now nothing more than pimp to power, Littel is an idealistic FBI agent who turns to the dark side once his illusions of a just world are destroyed. And Boyd Kemper, what to say about a man who is so well connected with all the seats of power of the underhanded and the underworld--he works at times for the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, the Kennedy's, and rubs shoulders with the Outfit--all for a cause. For his own purposes, he craves the patina of royalty he sees in the Kennedys. Underneath, he's nothing but a talented wannabe who plays all sides in the power games, keeping secrets, trading secrets for favors, working for justice in one city while destroying it another. A more duplicitous character does not exist in all literature outside of the Borgia popes. And these are the heroes of Ellroy's story. I gave this book five stars for a couple of reasons, one is not for his vision of America as a cesspool of dirty tricks in the name of sex, power, and money. What Ellory does accomplish is connect the dots of an era and make sense of it--if you want to believe that sense--but it is believable in his telling. There are many victims in this story, not least of which are the American people. But RFK is the single primary victim of this story, more so than the naive Cuban exiles who were cut down on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. They were nothing but pawns in Dulles's private war on world leaders he didn't like. In this book you will read of the marriage of criminals and cops to foment a revolution that made no sense, that the people didn't even appear to want. That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? What was the purpose of this invasion of Cuba sponsored by the CIA and underwritten by the Outfit's dope pedaling to blacks and Cubans? It was nothing more than an effort to restore the criminals to their casinos camouflaged by a blinding hatred of commies puffing on big stoggies just 90 miles off our shore. Fidel is blowing smoke in our faces, and the powers that be cannot abide his arrogance. It was a fiasco mission from the get go with little hope of success unless they can manipulate the new president into doing something foolish. Which he doesn't do, sealing his fate. So now we come at last to RFK. He's a Kennedy, so he's not immune to a dirty trick or two, but he has been bitten by the bug of justice. He believes that Jimmy Hoffa is the worst criminal in America and has to be brought down. He believes the mafia exists and must be expunged. He believes hoodlums have to be brought to account, but he can't find the evidence to prove his point. Until one day it shows up. That scene reminded me of when Oedipus learned the truth. The truth he had fought against all of his life, the curse that had dogged him, that he had killed his father and married his mother. He cried and then did other things, none of which I will bring up here. The man in our story sheds a tear. He has decency. He has a moment of regret that he is a Kennedy--maybe. I don't know. How can one regret such things? From here it is all conjecture. This is all I'm going to say. I need to go take a shower now and wash away the remnants of this tragedy. What I will not do is retreat into reading Amish Romances. I don't hold to Ellory's theory of American turned rotten. There is no doubt the rotten, but there are also good men and women who have built the legacy of the America most of us live in. That's all I'm going to say--for now. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.id/products/18028827-american-tabloid](https://www.desertcart.id/products/18028827-american-tabloid) --- *Product available on Desertcart Indonesia* *Store origin: ID* *Last updated: 2026-05-17*