The Smoking Gun: A Dossier of Secret, Surprising, and Salacious Documents

by William Bastone, Daniel Green, Barbara Glauber

From the creators of the Web site thesmokinggun.com comes an entertaining selection of previously unpublished documents-including FBI files, morgue and police reports, and court transcripts-that shed new light on some of the most bizarre and scandalous news stories of recent history, Ted Kaczynski's requests for a sex change and Burt Reynolds debts to toupee companies. Original. 40,000 first printing.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction, Humor, Crime

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2001

Reviews

[Kaion · Rating 2 out of 5]

The bathroom read, the lowly and less-glossy cousin of the coffee-table tome, really doesn't have to more than vaguely diverting (and very importantly, but not too interesting) and digestible in short segments.*

The thing is I don't actually read in the bathroom, so I hadn't really gotten any further than the few pages into The Smoking Gun I'd read when I first impulse bought it a few years ago. So in the interest of some pre-spring cleaning, I flipped through the rest of the book.

Verdict: While the idea of letting the primary source documents speak for themselves or celebration of the Freedom of Information Act or some sort of equalization of knowledge power is all well and commendable in theory... in practice, well, a lot of the documents here aren't all that interesting. Sure, it's funny to learn that there's been a police report of man beating someone with a big fish. But given the punchline, is the set-up for that joke really necessary?

Maybe a lot of this has to do with the selection. The Smoking Gun editors seem to think the autopsy reports of famous people are particular interesting (dead is dead, whether you're assassinated or overdose or die in your sleep, famous or unfamous), or that the public is clamoring to compare which fruits their favorite bands demand set up on tour on a variety platter. On the occasion the topic itself is interesting (the CIA wanted to train cats as assassins?), I did get a bit of voyeuristic pleasure out of reading the actual (and heavily redacted documents)... but those pleasures wear off pretty quickly and ultimately serve as a reminder why journalists exist to actually narrow down the flux of information to actual newsworthy material and the analysis of such. Rating: 2 stars

*I've also seen in other bathrooms, lots of magazine back-issues. Some people go the other way and have beloved/classic dog-eared copies of books in there (a friend's got Lord of the Rings and Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy).

[Daren Doucet · Rating 2 out of 5]

I find the book somewhat entertaining to say the least. It gives you a high, a low, then a high, happy, mood changes through what you read through the dossiers of FBI and police files on the average citizen gone mad to the movie star gone wild. There are some surprising tidbits, as the stories move from divorces, murders, sexually explicit, and just the wackiest.

[Les Gehman · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like the website thesmokinggun.com you know what to expect here. I especially enjoyed the continuing saga of Dennis Rodman's sexual assaults which appear throughout the book. This book would have earned five stars if it had included my favorite topic, the mugshot roundup.

[Bryan]

Funny as all hell!: This book is pretty dam slick. I liked it mostly because I have been a fan of the website for a few years and its pretty good to have the material right in front of you.