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Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder
‘Written with Burleigh’s characteristic brio, with pithy summaries of historical moments (he is brilliant on the Americans in Vietnam, for example) and full of surprising vignettes’ – The Times ’Book of the Week’In Day of the Assassins, acclaimed historian Michael Burleigh examines assassination as a special category of political violence and asks whether, like a contagious disease, it can be catching.Focusing chiefly on the last century and a half, Burleigh takes readers from Europe, Russia, Israel and the United States to the Congo, India, Iran, Laos, Rwanda, South Africa and Vietnam. And, as we travel, we revisit notable assassinations, among them Leon Trotsky, Hendrik Verwoerd, Juvénal Habyarimana, Indira Gandhi, Yitzhak Rabin and Jamal Khashoggi.Combining human drama, questions of political morality and the sheer randomness of events, Day of the Assassins is a riveting insight into the politics of violence.‘Brilliant and timely . . . Our world today is as dangerous and mixed-up as it has ever been. Luckily we have Michael Burleigh to help us make sense of it.’ – Mail on Sunday
556 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 27, 2021
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282 people want to read
About the author
Michael Burleigh
25 books97 followersMichael Burleigh is a British author and historian.
In 1977 Michael Burleigh took a first class honours degree in Medieval and Modern History at University College London, winning the Pollard, Dolley and Sir William Mayer prizes. After a PhD in medieval history in 1982, he went on to hold posts at New College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Cardiff where he was Distinguished Research Professor in Modern History. He has also been Raoul Wallenberg Chair of Human Rights at Rutgers University in New Jersey, William Rand Kenan Professor of History at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, and Kratter Visiting Professor at Stanford University, California. In 2002 he gave the three Cardinal Basil Hume Memorial Lectures at Heythrop College, University of London. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He founded the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and is on the editorial boards of Totalitarismus und Demokratie and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
In 1977 Michael Burleigh took a first class honours degree in Medieval and Modern History at University College London, winning the Pollard, Dolley and Sir William Mayer prizes. After a PhD in medieval history in 1982, he went on to hold posts at New College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Cardiff where he was Distinguished Research Professor in Modern History. He has also been Raoul Wallenberg Chair of Human Rights at Rutgers University in New Jersey, William Rand Kenan Professor of History at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, and Kratter Visiting Professor at Stanford University, California. In 2002 he gave the three Cardinal Basil Hume Memorial Lectures at Heythrop College, University of London. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He founded the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and is on the editorial boards of Totalitarismus und Demokratie and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
June 23, 2023
Very interesting. Some times i got lost from too many details of who murdered wgo. But some chapters wrre facinating with the info, plots and the charactets involved.
The only missing part is what goes in the mind of the assassin. But maybe it is left to thriller writers.
The only missing part is what goes in the mind of the assassin. But maybe it is left to thriller writers.
March 4, 2023
Not so much about assassins as the political and religious circumstances and beliefs that bring them about. At no point did the author try to really get under the skin of an assassin and delve into their character or motivation. Indeed, at times this felt like it had nothing to do with assassins and was instead a lesson on political history. Too broad in scope, this was unfocused and uneven, jumping from one thing to the next. Unless you have a good grasp of historical geopolitics then much of it washes over your head. The writing is turgid at times, long, confusing sentences with too many names and abbreviations, easily losing the reader in detail. The author's own strong views sometimes derail the whole thing. Only just avoided one star on the evidence that clearly its well researched and a lot of work has gone into it, but in the end, poorly written. A better book would pick 6 or 7 famous assassinations from history to focus on and build an argument around them. This was all over the place trying to cover too much. Very disappointing.
October 1, 2025
Frustrating on two levels. The superficial: tons of typos; lots of little mistakes of fact, some more serious than others, some simply bewildering (eg Officer JD Tippit, Lee Harvey Oswald’s second victim, is introduced as “JD Tippit” but every other time he is mentioned—beginning in the same paragraph—his name is misspelled “Tibbit”); and confusing structure from story to story, often beginning with an assassination, backtracking to the beginning of the victim’s life, backtracking again to cover the context of the assassination, and backtracking yet again to cover the assassin.
Deeper problems: “political murder” is far too broad and ill-defined a category. This book therefore covers a huge variety of violence, a lot of which has little in common with anything else. This would be all right if Burleigh could draw some kind of insight that unites everything from Caesar, Lincoln, Franz Ferdinand, and Patrice Lumumba to Black September, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mossad, American drone operators, and—yes—January 6. But all he has is platitudes and barely disguised latter-day political prejudices. This disjointed narrative never coheres and ends with a series of half-hearted prescriptions.
What keeps this from being simply a bad book is that it has both flashes of gripping storytelling and thought-provoking, insightful analysis, but too little of either and seldom at the same time.
I’ve enjoyed and benefited from Burleigh’s work before but have seen a lot of negative reviews of his more recent books. Sorry to confirm those reviews, at least for this book.
Deeper problems: “political murder” is far too broad and ill-defined a category. This book therefore covers a huge variety of violence, a lot of which has little in common with anything else. This would be all right if Burleigh could draw some kind of insight that unites everything from Caesar, Lincoln, Franz Ferdinand, and Patrice Lumumba to Black September, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mossad, American drone operators, and—yes—January 6. But all he has is platitudes and barely disguised latter-day political prejudices. This disjointed narrative never coheres and ends with a series of half-hearted prescriptions.
What keeps this from being simply a bad book is that it has both flashes of gripping storytelling and thought-provoking, insightful analysis, but too little of either and seldom at the same time.
I’ve enjoyed and benefited from Burleigh’s work before but have seen a lot of negative reviews of his more recent books. Sorry to confirm those reviews, at least for this book.
January 28, 2023
This book tries to cover too much and so ends up covering nothing. Some killings are only given a paragraph, others maybe 10 pages, which is not nearly enough to really understand the motivations for killing various leaders of countries with highly complex political histories.
You are also expected to remember a whole bunch of acronyms, and alternative names for various acronymed groups (which burleigh will use interchangeably, sometimes making it seem as though one group is two different groups). Timelines are unclear as burleigh likes to set up the scene (which is fine) but then will proceed to jump backwards and forwards in time repeatedly, including to after the assassination in question, as different characters are introduced, so within one page he can touch on 4 or 5 different years.
But despite not explaining a whole lot of background or aftermath, burleigh does find time to throw in random, unnecessary and sometimes unintelligible details which add nothing. If someone can explain to me what "the obscurantist Catholic philosophy of personalism and neo-confucianism" of Ngo Dinh Diem actually means that would be most helpful. He seems to think this sort of interlude adds pizazz or maybe humour, when it mostly adds frustration.
It would be a much better book if burleigh picked one assassination per chapter which was illustrative of the points he wanted to make. Then at the end tie up with the points he touched on about whether assassination actually helps or hinders the state who ordered it. Or at the very least stay within one country and in vaguely chronological order within a chapter. The best chapter was the one on drones where he stuck to that topic for quite some time so actually explored the consequences of drone warfare.
Finally, parts are just very poorly edited. For example the book states that Benjamin Netanyahu wants Yossi Cohen to succeed him, and then repeats that Netanyahu views Cohen as a possible successor at the start of the very next paragraph. Also acronyms or shortenings are provided their full name after they have already been used several times.
You are also expected to remember a whole bunch of acronyms, and alternative names for various acronymed groups (which burleigh will use interchangeably, sometimes making it seem as though one group is two different groups). Timelines are unclear as burleigh likes to set up the scene (which is fine) but then will proceed to jump backwards and forwards in time repeatedly, including to after the assassination in question, as different characters are introduced, so within one page he can touch on 4 or 5 different years.
But despite not explaining a whole lot of background or aftermath, burleigh does find time to throw in random, unnecessary and sometimes unintelligible details which add nothing. If someone can explain to me what "the obscurantist Catholic philosophy of personalism and neo-confucianism" of Ngo Dinh Diem actually means that would be most helpful. He seems to think this sort of interlude adds pizazz or maybe humour, when it mostly adds frustration.
It would be a much better book if burleigh picked one assassination per chapter which was illustrative of the points he wanted to make. Then at the end tie up with the points he touched on about whether assassination actually helps or hinders the state who ordered it. Or at the very least stay within one country and in vaguely chronological order within a chapter. The best chapter was the one on drones where he stuck to that topic for quite some time so actually explored the consequences of drone warfare.
Finally, parts are just very poorly edited. For example the book states that Benjamin Netanyahu wants Yossi Cohen to succeed him, and then repeats that Netanyahu views Cohen as a possible successor at the start of the very next paragraph. Also acronyms or shortenings are provided their full name after they have already been used several times.
July 25, 2021
Starts off very listy for the hundred pages or so and is quite a slog. Generally speaking it picks up as we move closer and closer to the present day, at which point there is a bit more emphasis on analysis and a stronger voice from the author. I felt this was missing a bit of an overall message, and perhaps this could have been brought out with a bit more focus (say, if the book only covered the period after WW1).
May 30, 2022
Very uneven, overgeneralised and in the one case that I do know something about (the September 1966 assassination of South African prime minister and architect of apartheid, Dr. H.F. Verwoerd), the account is filled with very sloppy errors of geography and fact.
I gave up in the end, lost interest in the author's somewhat superficial and sensationalist style.
I gave up in the end, lost interest in the author's somewhat superficial and sensationalist style.
January 24, 2024
too problematic, with a fair number of mistakes
and sometimes overly simplistic of some pretty complex situations, which is a big disappointment
The interesting thing about political murder is sometimes it creates very little change, and at other times, it can create a significant shift, and not always to better outcomes.
----
This is pretty interestingly strange and peculiar review
[Meades work spans journalism, fiction, essays, memoir and over fifty highly idiosyncratic television films, and has been described as brainy, scabrous, mischievous, iconoclastic, and possessed of a polymathic breadth of knowledge and truly caustic wit.]
.......
Literary Review
Et Tu, Brute?
Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder - Michael Burleigh
Jonathan Meades
In times like these we have to rue that Britain has only a paltry tradition of political assassination. This, I’d propose, is not a mark of civilisation but of timidity and the eschewal of realpolitik.
To overcome our squeamishness, we might gainfully study this breathless race through two thousand years of special pollarding, which might have been more aptly named ‘Assassination: A Handbook’, for it is, among much else, an inventory of means and methods: blades, blunt objects, poisons and toxins, guns and ammo, shots from motorcycles, bombs, defenestration and plump cushions.
Assassination signifies the taking of life. So, obviously, does murder. They are not, however, synonymous. Assassination is planned. It most probably involves an ambush or trap, and before that high-level debates and decisions made in meetings, which typically are not minuted.
Murder doesn’t generally involve such things. Assassinations are intended. They are tactical instruments and tools – if not also proxies – of war.
They are, equally, evasions of war and bulwarks against tyranny. Michael Burleigh is dubious about the beneficial effects of governmentally sanctioned killing.
However, a perhaps unforeseen outcome of his relentlessly sanguinary book is the implication that the planet, far from being sullied by opérations ponctuelles, might be a happier place were a few more tyrants to be treated to well-aimed headshots. There can, for instance, be no doubt that had Benito Mussolini been shot and strung up in Piazzale Loreto a few years earlier than he was, he would not have bought a road map to catastrophe from Adolf Hitler.
Hitler was himself a frequent target, of course. Burleigh retells the story of the communist Georg Elser’s failed attempt on Hitler’s life in November 1939, ten weeks after war had been declared. It became the subject of Stephen Sheppard’s novel The Artisan; Klaus Maria Brandauer both directed the film adaptation and played Elser. Yet it is less well known than the July 1944 bomb plot on Hitler’s life.
As Burleigh drily points out, the aristocratic bomb plotters ‘had considerably more post-war utility to the class of person who reads broadsheet German newspapers than a humble Swabian Communist carpenter’.
Joachim Fest estimated that in the ten months between the failed 1944 plot and the Nazi surrender in May 1945 4.8 million Germans died. Burleigh goes further, trepidatiously, and suggests that had Elser’s bomb succeeded ‘there might not have been a lengthy war at all; none of Hitler’s peers possessed his charisma or oratorical skills, and the army high command might have swept them aside’.
The work Day of the Assassins persistently recalls is neither historical nor literary but a film, Alan Clarke’s Elephant, a dourly brilliant realistic album of sectarian assassinations in Belfast. The cumulative effect, heightened by Steadicam, is thrillingly gruesome and stomach-churning. So it is with Burleigh’s book.
There are, of course, commentary and context, but every page is weighted with names of operatives in the death business: victims and culprits, executants and collaterals, backroom technicians, black-ops tacticians, the pseudonymous and the disguised whose trade demands not merely cold blood but the ability to cover their tracks.
Jamal Khashoggi’s killers and their overlords were markedly wanting in this department. Burleigh is a clear-headed guide to the Saudi crown prince’s perpetual handwashing.
Other killers have been less concerned to conceal their acts: among them, astonishingly, is Dwight D Eisenhower, who ordered the despatch of Patrice Lumumba with the words, ‘We will have to do whatever is necessary to get rid of him.’
For a secret organisation, Mossad is remarkably ostentatious. But then Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir never made a secret of having been members of the murderous Irgun and its offshoot Lehi, which attempted to treat with Nazi Germany in the hope that the latter would wage war against the British mandatory government in Palestine.
Years later, Mossad successfully recruited the multiply scarred former(-ish) Nazi Otto Skorzeny, who was happy to both grass up old comrades, among them veterans of the V-1 and V-2 programmes now developing missiles in Nasser’s Egypt, and, if necessary, put them to sleep. Such was, most probably, the fate of the fixer and arms dealer Heinz Krug.
Skorzeny, like many of Burleigh’s subjects, was a Talleyrand, in this case a muscle-bound Talleyrand, who was as happy to maim and liquidate for de Gaulle’s Barbouzes as he was to advise the OAS, the anti-Algerian independence organisation that Burleigh wrongly describes as ‘a right-wing terrorist group’.
It wasn’t. Rather, it was people fighting for their homes. Its high command included many former Resistance fighters and Raoul Salan, the most decorated soldier in the French army. Its ground troops were petites gens.
They were losing everything because of de Gaulle’s treachery in sacrificing them to the FLN, the war crimes of which over a long decade far outdid those of the OAS. It is a matter of great regret that none of the attempts on de Gaulle’s life succeeded. He was a lucky ‘fascist’ – the term is Roosevelt’s.
Burleigh moves swiftly from the fortunate survivor to John F Kennedy, who, as a senator, had militated for Algerian independence and, as president, visited de Gaulle a few weeks after the generals’ failed coup of April 1961.
Given Kennedy’s clumsiness over the Bay of Pigs and his escalation of the war in Vietnam, with the dispatch of thousands of ‘military advisers’, his position on Algeria was risibly hypocritical.
Burleigh rather rashly dismisses the possibility of Kennedy’s assassination being the culmination of a conspiracy.
So: no Mafia, no CIA, no grassy knoll, no storm drain, no bogus policemen, no James Jesus Angleton.
.Just one troubled loner whose familiar back story is neatly, if omissively recounted. I’m not certain that the notion of a single shooter remains credible
Still, Burleigh’s opt-out does mean that his book does not get bogged down in the world of serious investigators, conspiracy industrialists, mutually refuting anoraks and wacky hobbyists.
In his afterword, Burleigh, eager to put a lid on the topic in which he has immersed himself to the point of satiety, writes of assassins that ‘in most cases what they did on their big day had no real consequences other than to temporarily discombobulate a society with an act bound up with their own life stories and personalities’.
This is surely an underestimation of both the assassin’s power and the dire litany of killings that fills this harshly excellent book.
Certain eras have been defined by assassinations, and others by those that failed or were not attempted.
Mossad could have wasted Ayatollah Khomeini when he was hiding in plain sight at Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, and so might France’s DST. But the Shah advised President Giscard d’Estaing’s right-hand man Michel Poniatowski against such an action, with the results that we see today.
and sometimes overly simplistic of some pretty complex situations, which is a big disappointment
The interesting thing about political murder is sometimes it creates very little change, and at other times, it can create a significant shift, and not always to better outcomes.
----
This is pretty interestingly strange and peculiar review
[Meades work spans journalism, fiction, essays, memoir and over fifty highly idiosyncratic television films, and has been described as brainy, scabrous, mischievous, iconoclastic, and possessed of a polymathic breadth of knowledge and truly caustic wit.]
.......
Literary Review
Et Tu, Brute?
Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder - Michael Burleigh
Jonathan Meades
In times like these we have to rue that Britain has only a paltry tradition of political assassination. This, I’d propose, is not a mark of civilisation but of timidity and the eschewal of realpolitik.
To overcome our squeamishness, we might gainfully study this breathless race through two thousand years of special pollarding, which might have been more aptly named ‘Assassination: A Handbook’, for it is, among much else, an inventory of means and methods: blades, blunt objects, poisons and toxins, guns and ammo, shots from motorcycles, bombs, defenestration and plump cushions.
Assassination signifies the taking of life. So, obviously, does murder. They are not, however, synonymous. Assassination is planned. It most probably involves an ambush or trap, and before that high-level debates and decisions made in meetings, which typically are not minuted.
Murder doesn’t generally involve such things. Assassinations are intended. They are tactical instruments and tools – if not also proxies – of war.
They are, equally, evasions of war and bulwarks against tyranny. Michael Burleigh is dubious about the beneficial effects of governmentally sanctioned killing.
However, a perhaps unforeseen outcome of his relentlessly sanguinary book is the implication that the planet, far from being sullied by opérations ponctuelles, might be a happier place were a few more tyrants to be treated to well-aimed headshots. There can, for instance, be no doubt that had Benito Mussolini been shot and strung up in Piazzale Loreto a few years earlier than he was, he would not have bought a road map to catastrophe from Adolf Hitler.
Hitler was himself a frequent target, of course. Burleigh retells the story of the communist Georg Elser’s failed attempt on Hitler’s life in November 1939, ten weeks after war had been declared. It became the subject of Stephen Sheppard’s novel The Artisan; Klaus Maria Brandauer both directed the film adaptation and played Elser. Yet it is less well known than the July 1944 bomb plot on Hitler’s life.
As Burleigh drily points out, the aristocratic bomb plotters ‘had considerably more post-war utility to the class of person who reads broadsheet German newspapers than a humble Swabian Communist carpenter’.
Joachim Fest estimated that in the ten months between the failed 1944 plot and the Nazi surrender in May 1945 4.8 million Germans died. Burleigh goes further, trepidatiously, and suggests that had Elser’s bomb succeeded ‘there might not have been a lengthy war at all; none of Hitler’s peers possessed his charisma or oratorical skills, and the army high command might have swept them aside’.
The work Day of the Assassins persistently recalls is neither historical nor literary but a film, Alan Clarke’s Elephant, a dourly brilliant realistic album of sectarian assassinations in Belfast. The cumulative effect, heightened by Steadicam, is thrillingly gruesome and stomach-churning. So it is with Burleigh’s book.
There are, of course, commentary and context, but every page is weighted with names of operatives in the death business: victims and culprits, executants and collaterals, backroom technicians, black-ops tacticians, the pseudonymous and the disguised whose trade demands not merely cold blood but the ability to cover their tracks.
Jamal Khashoggi’s killers and their overlords were markedly wanting in this department. Burleigh is a clear-headed guide to the Saudi crown prince’s perpetual handwashing.
Other killers have been less concerned to conceal their acts: among them, astonishingly, is Dwight D Eisenhower, who ordered the despatch of Patrice Lumumba with the words, ‘We will have to do whatever is necessary to get rid of him.’
For a secret organisation, Mossad is remarkably ostentatious. But then Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir never made a secret of having been members of the murderous Irgun and its offshoot Lehi, which attempted to treat with Nazi Germany in the hope that the latter would wage war against the British mandatory government in Palestine.
Years later, Mossad successfully recruited the multiply scarred former(-ish) Nazi Otto Skorzeny, who was happy to both grass up old comrades, among them veterans of the V-1 and V-2 programmes now developing missiles in Nasser’s Egypt, and, if necessary, put them to sleep. Such was, most probably, the fate of the fixer and arms dealer Heinz Krug.
Skorzeny, like many of Burleigh’s subjects, was a Talleyrand, in this case a muscle-bound Talleyrand, who was as happy to maim and liquidate for de Gaulle’s Barbouzes as he was to advise the OAS, the anti-Algerian independence organisation that Burleigh wrongly describes as ‘a right-wing terrorist group’.
It wasn’t. Rather, it was people fighting for their homes. Its high command included many former Resistance fighters and Raoul Salan, the most decorated soldier in the French army. Its ground troops were petites gens.
They were losing everything because of de Gaulle’s treachery in sacrificing them to the FLN, the war crimes of which over a long decade far outdid those of the OAS. It is a matter of great regret that none of the attempts on de Gaulle’s life succeeded. He was a lucky ‘fascist’ – the term is Roosevelt’s.
Burleigh moves swiftly from the fortunate survivor to John F Kennedy, who, as a senator, had militated for Algerian independence and, as president, visited de Gaulle a few weeks after the generals’ failed coup of April 1961.
Given Kennedy’s clumsiness over the Bay of Pigs and his escalation of the war in Vietnam, with the dispatch of thousands of ‘military advisers’, his position on Algeria was risibly hypocritical.
Burleigh rather rashly dismisses the possibility of Kennedy’s assassination being the culmination of a conspiracy.
So: no Mafia, no CIA, no grassy knoll, no storm drain, no bogus policemen, no James Jesus Angleton.
.Just one troubled loner whose familiar back story is neatly, if omissively recounted. I’m not certain that the notion of a single shooter remains credible
Still, Burleigh’s opt-out does mean that his book does not get bogged down in the world of serious investigators, conspiracy industrialists, mutually refuting anoraks and wacky hobbyists.
In his afterword, Burleigh, eager to put a lid on the topic in which he has immersed himself to the point of satiety, writes of assassins that ‘in most cases what they did on their big day had no real consequences other than to temporarily discombobulate a society with an act bound up with their own life stories and personalities’.
This is surely an underestimation of both the assassin’s power and the dire litany of killings that fills this harshly excellent book.
Certain eras have been defined by assassinations, and others by those that failed or were not attempted.
Mossad could have wasted Ayatollah Khomeini when he was hiding in plain sight at Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, and so might France’s DST. But the Shah advised President Giscard d’Estaing’s right-hand man Michel Poniatowski against such an action, with the results that we see today.
March 14, 2023
**ARC from Edelweiss**
I would recommend this book only to people who really love world history and politics. I enjoyed this book but it was incredibly dense with many names (individuals as well as organizations) to keep track of.
The author organizes the book well and his style of writing is easy to follow.
If someone is reading this book looking for a list of assassins and the assassinated, they will be disappointed. As I learned, assassinations don't take place in a vacuum, you need to know what was going on politically at the time to fully understand what was going on.
I would recommend this book only to people who really love world history and politics. I enjoyed this book but it was incredibly dense with many names (individuals as well as organizations) to keep track of.
The author organizes the book well and his style of writing is easy to follow.
If someone is reading this book looking for a list of assassins and the assassinated, they will be disappointed. As I learned, assassinations don't take place in a vacuum, you need to know what was going on politically at the time to fully understand what was going on.
July 3, 2021
Good overview of political assassinations in some parts of the world. I found the book however to be less in depth that most other books I have read from Michael Burleigh and more of a catalogue and synopsis of political assassinations.
January 19, 2024
I would not recommend. Mr. Burleigh injects his personal political views throughout the book often with no rhyme or reason for offering them. If that's not enough, his writing style is rather boring and his ability to weave together a story is questionable at best.
January 26, 2024
There's a good deal of really interesting stuff in this book. Actually reading it is not so easy. Despite the fascinating historical topic, "Day of the Assassins" reads more like a textbook than the series of great stories it might have been. Burleigh makes an admirable effort to provide factual background to each assassination he covers -- from Julius Caesar to Osama Bin Laden -- but the book is crammed with more names and places than even this history buff could ever follow.
There's another substantive issue within "Day of the Assassins." According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (among others), its definition is: "murder by sudden or secret attack often for political reasons : the act or an instance of assassinating someone (such as a prominent political leader)." Burleigh goes well outside this by including genocides and mass killings of civilians. While horrible, brutal actions, these abominations are not defined as "assassinations." Narrowing the scope would have made for a more compelling read.
Good history is storytelling, not a recitation of facts with a few smarmy comments thrown in. "Day of the Assassin" feels like the work of someone who likes to hear himself talk. These are crucial, history-making events told much better elsewhere.
There's another substantive issue within "Day of the Assassins." According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (among others), its definition is: "murder by sudden or secret attack often for political reasons : the act or an instance of assassinating someone (such as a prominent political leader)." Burleigh goes well outside this by including genocides and mass killings of civilians. While horrible, brutal actions, these abominations are not defined as "assassinations." Narrowing the scope would have made for a more compelling read.
Good history is storytelling, not a recitation of facts with a few smarmy comments thrown in. "Day of the Assassin" feels like the work of someone who likes to hear himself talk. These are crucial, history-making events told much better elsewhere.
December 23, 2023
I was slightly disappointed by this book. I'd expected better of such an eminent historian. Stronger at the start dealing with Caesar ("the bright day brings forth the adder"), Lincoln, and others; weaker later on when it deals with what are more like mass killings in Congo and Cambodia rather than assassinations per se. But it does have an insightful section on Anarchism as a philosophy that embraced assossination and the "propaganda of the deed" more than any other movement of recent times.
The style is quite dense and the timelines not always clear, which is a shame as it covers a lot of ground: perhaps that's the problem, and a more focused book would read better.
The style is quite dense and the timelines not always clear, which is a shame as it covers a lot of ground: perhaps that's the problem, and a more focused book would read better.
Read
November 17, 2021A subject i knew so very little about. One outcome is that assassinations very seldom have a positive effect on the future as the person replacing the one assassinated is often a worse option. The authors view of Kennedy's murder put to be for me the many conspiracy theories. Not an easy read as it covers many assassinations over a long period so there's lots of detail to absorb
Read
December 9, 2023Dnf
December 30, 2024
Interesting work on an interesting topic but somewhat undermined by frequent typos and editorialising
Read
July 21, 2025lnteresting topic, style a little challenging and a but on the long side.
May 22, 2025
This book is poorly conceived in almost every aspect and reading it felt like a chore. It is nonsensically organized; sometimes it is chronological, other times geographical, and occasionally similar ideas are presented together. There is an onslaught of pointless detail throughout the entire book. Paradoxically, it often reads as though a lot of geopolitical context is missing, since space on the page is wasted with names and organizations (acronyms are not always spelled out either which was so frustrating) that appear once and never again. The argument this book is trying to make is stifled by these chronic issues. This main argument, by the way, is absent except at the very beginning and very end. The author doesn't add much insight of their own, either, which makes me think my time would have been better spent browsing Wikipedia.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews