Reclaiming History - Critical and Commercial Reception

Critical and Commercial Reception

In a review for The New York Times, Bryan Burrough wrote: "Bugliosi is refreshing because he doesn’t just pick apart the conspiracy theorists. He ridicules them, and by name, writing that 'most of them are as kooky as a $3 bill.'" Alex Kingsbury of the U.S. News & World Report described it as "the most exhaustive of the countless narratives that have been written about that fateful day in Dallas." According to Steve Donoghue of Open Letters Monthly: "Reclaiming History, in addition to being the longest book ever written on the subject of the Kennedy assassination, is also the most enjoyable of them all to read." Tim Shipman of The Telegraph said: "Mr Bugliosi... has turned up no new killer fact. His technique instead is to expose the double-think and distortions of the conspiracy theorists."

Reviewing the book for Salon, David Talbot charged that "the skin-deep nature of Bugliosi’s research is striking" and that he is "guilty of cooking the facts to make his case". James H. Fetzer contended that "Bugliosi has misled his readers by lies, omissions, and deliberate distortions, where, in particular, when confronted with evidence that is incompatible with his own—official but fanciful—theory, he either twists, warps, and distorts the evidence or simply ignores it. His key claims are not merely provably false but, in crucial cases, not even physically possible.."