Peter Harry Brown

A fascinating, thoroughly researched and detailed exegesis of the mysterious and impactful life of Howard Hughes. Being brain-damaged, syphillitic, and enslaved by OCD would be a debilitating condition for you and I, probably leading to institutionalized. For the charismatic genius Hughes, it was merely crippling and it took six decades to do him in while surrounded by Mormons and sycophants. Along the way, the satyr chased skirts (Katherine Hepburn to Ava Gardner and beyond), kept a virtual show more harem, advanced aviation from military to commercial and built the family oil drill tooling fortune to a billion dollar fortune where he held sway over a vast empire that included an airline, entertainment studios, casinos, and more.

Probably among the most revealing exposes here (if among the most thinly documented) is that Nixon's famous recording deletion covered damaging admission to Hughes' money going into Nixon's pockets.

In epilogue, the author paints those Mormons and sycophants of harboring among their numbers murderers or at least manslaughters. With the Mexican eventual charge on his codeine-administering doctor, the whole life bears a remarkable similarity to the decline and demise of Michael Jackson as popularly understood. show less

I've been obsessed with Howard Hughes since I was little - yeah, I was a weird kid. I just couldn't imagine anyone living the way he did in later years. This is a big book, and goes into depth about Hughes personal & professional lives. Most of the time, you got enough detail, and the book moved along well, but a few times I would have liked to have known more (though the lack may have been due to the fact that so little is known about some details of Hughes life). It's such a sad story show more about an interesting character - I can't help but wish he was alive now, when medical knowledge could have helped him & improved his life dramatically & who knows what else he could have accomplished. show less

Barham & Brown did a superb job of producing a book on the iconic Marilyn Monroe that borders on scholarly work. They uncovered thousands of pages of documents, photographs, declassified FBI documents (under the FIA), interviews, film footage and wiretap-tapes made at the order of the late J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director under President Kennedy. A serious fan will find much evidence to support the theory that Ms. Monroe was murdered in an effort to "hush her up." It seems she had been privy to show more too much high-level information. Although they've laid out a solid case for the real events of the night of her death, some of the secrets of what really happened to Marilyn went with her to the grave. show less

One of my favorite books on Marilyn to date.