Overview

"""I do regret that I didn't succeed, and allow the winds of change to start. I wish I had killed him. I did it to create chaos."" - Sara Jane Moore Geri Spieler met would-be assasin Sara Jane Moore while she was in prison; Taking Aim at the President is based on 30-years of interviews. Spieler follows Moore's actions from her childhood in a small West Virginia town to her release from prison in December 2007. Moore's life was never conventional, and along the way she entered and dropped out of the military, was married five times, and was both a political radical and an FBI informant. Focusing on the complex psychology and motivations of a quintessentially desperate housewife and the only woman to ever fire a bullet at an American president, Spieler delivers a nuanced portrait of an elusive person and a fascinating glimpse back at a turbulent period in American history."

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Reviews

Spieler offers a portrait of an erratic, unstable woman with a protean capacity to shift identities, with the 1960s and '70s as a dramatic backdrop. Fans of true crime accounts or contemporary history will savor this portrait of the first woman to make an assassination attempt on an American president. -- Publishers Weekly It is the obligation of the thoughtful journalist to tell us something meaningful that we don't already know. In Taking Aim at the President, Geri Spieler is more than up to the task. The byzantine tale of Sara Jane Moore's double, triple and quadruple lives, with so many bizarre groups -- including the federal government -- exploiting her vulnerabilities, is the stuff of Hollywood fiction. The fact that it's all true, and told with precision by Spieler, raises Sara Jane's story to something significantly more than a footnote to history. --Alan Weisman, author of Prince of Darkness: Richard Perle, The Kingdom, the Power & the End of Empire in America and Lone Star: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Dan Rather A well-written, fascinating story about an inexplicable moment in American History. -- Carl Stern, Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University, and former NBC News correspondent <p> Geri Spieler has done a marvelous job of unraveling the details surrounding one of the most bizarre events in American history, Sara Jane Moore's attack on Gerald Ford. - James Dalessandro, author of 1906 and Citizen Jane Talk about truth being stranger than fiction! Captivating. -- The San Francisco Chronicle

Winner of the 2009 San Francisco Book Festival Award (Wild Card category) Spieler offers a portrait of an erratic, unstable woman with a protean capacity to shift identities, with the 1960s and '70s as a dramatic backdrop. Fans of true crime accounts or contemporary history will savor this portrait of the first woman to make an assassination attempt on an American president. - Publishers Weekly It is the obligation of the thoughtful journalist to tell us something meaningful that we dona (TM)t already know. In Taking Aim at the President , Geri Spieler is more than up to the task.The byzantine tale ofSara Jane Moore's double, triple and quadruple lives, with so many bizarre groups - including the federal government - exploiting her vulnerabilities, is the stuff of Hollywood fiction. The fact that ita (TM)s all true, and told with precision by Spieler, raises Sara Janea (TM)s story to something significantly more than a footnote to history. - Alan Weisman, author of Prince of Darkness: Richard Perle, The Kingdom, the Power & the End of Empire in America and Lone Star: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Dan Rather A well-written, fascinating story about an inexplicable moment in American History. - Carl Stern, Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University, and former NBC News correspondent Geri Spieler has done a marvelous job of unraveling the details surrounding one of the most bizarre events in American history, Sara Jane Moorea (TM)s attack on Gerald Ford. - James Dalessandro, author of 1906 and Citizen Jane Talk about truth being stranger than fiction! Captivating. - The San Francisco Chronicle

Amateurishly written, disappointingly superficial biography of Sara Jane Moore.Freelance journalist Spieler has a rich subject in the psychologically disturbed middle-aged housewife and erstwhile FBI informant who fired twice at President Gerald Ford as he left the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September 22, 1975. Not long after her arrest, Moore contacted the author, then a reporter at the Los Angeles News Journal, and the two had sporadic contact during the next 28 years. In 2003, Moore suggested that Spieler write a book about her, but the writer soon balked at her ground rules and they fell out. Unfortunately, this did not dissuade Spieler from going ahead with her slipshod biography. She interviewed a mere handful of Moore's acquaintances and family members, most of whom apparently had little to say. Her text leaves yawning gaps in Moore's story; one 11-year period is glossed over with the excuse, attempts to find documentation on the decade that followed were futile. Instead, Spieler includes largely tangential chapters on San Francisco's radical underground and the FBI's counterintelligence program; in the final chapters, she quotes liberally from court transcripts for pages at a time. The biography does little to explain Moore's motives for the assassination attempt; readers will come away knowing little more about her than they might get from the book's dust jacket. Jess Bravin's exhaustively researched Squeaky (1997), the biography of another would-be Ford assassin, ably brought to life the violent and chaotic era in which Lynette Fromme lived. Spieler's scene-setting, by contrast, is trite in the extreme: Bob Dylan wrote those now-famous lines, 'the times, they are a changin' and true to those words, Sara Jane changed with the times. Moore's complex and fascinating story deserves better treatment. (Kirkus Reviews)

Winner of the 2009 San Francisco Book Festival Award (Wild Card category)<p>&nbsp; Spieler offers a portrait of an erratic, unstable woman with a protean capacity to shift identities, with the 1960s and '70s as a dramatic backdrop. Fans of true crime accounts or contemporary history will savor this portrait of the first woman to make an assassination attempt on an American president. -- Publishers Weekly &nbsp; It is the obligation of the thoughtful journalist to tell us something meaningful that we don&#8217;t already know.&nbsp; In Taking Aim at the President, Geri Spieler is more than up to the task.&nbsp;&nbsp;The byzantine tale of&nbsp;Sara Jane Moore's double, triple and quadruple lives, with so many bizarre groups --&nbsp;including the federal government --&nbsp;exploiting her vulnerabilities, is the stuff of Hollywood fiction. The fact that it&#8217;s all true, and told with precision by Spieler, raises Sara Jane&#8217;s story to something significantly more than a footnote

Winner of the 2009 San Francisco Book Festival Award (Wild Card category)<p> Spieler offers a portrait of an erratic, unstable woman with a protean capacity to shift identities, with the 1960s and '70s as a dramatic backdrop. Fans of true crime accounts or contemporary history will savor this portrait of the first woman to make an assassination attempt on an American president. -- Publishers Weekly It is the obligation of the thoughtful journalist to tell us something meaningful that we don't already know. In Taking Aim at the President, Geri Spieler is more than up to the task. The byzantine tale of Sara Jane Moore's double, triple and quadruple lives, with so many bizarre groups -- including the federal government -- exploiting her vulnerabilities, is the stuff of Hollywood fiction. The fact that it's all true, and told with precision by Spieler, raises Sara Jane's story to something significantly more than a footnote to history. --Alan Weisman, author of Prince of Darkness:

Author Information

GERI SPIELER is an Investigative Journalist and Award-winning Speaker. She has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Forbes. She lives in San Francisco, California, USA.

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