A fitting personal tribute to a unique boss.
Entertaining memoir from the personal assistant and publicist to John F. Kennedy Jr.
For five years, Bronx-born Terenzio worked for the iconic JFK Jr. The author recalls tense first encounters with the dashing socialite as he insinuated himself, unannounced, into her spacious office, but eventually his persistent attempts to ease the tension worked and the two became friendly. Terenzio eventually became his personal assistant at Kennedy’s start-up magazine, George. The author soon discovered that assisting a Kennedy was no easy feat, but her story makes deliriously fun reading. Juggling last-minute responsibilities and thwarting the rapacious media and “annoying hangers-on” became commonplace duties in her job working for boss who could be callous and had little patience for mistakes on a schedule overflowing with business and social engagements. Terenzio characterizes herself as a hard worker with a direct demeanor and an Italian temper, a diehard Howard Stern fan who assumed the role of Kennedy’s gatekeeper, constantly “controlling access to someone who everyone wanted a piece of.” She also proves herself a model of loyalty, trustworthiness and discretion during her tenure on Kennedy’s payroll, most notably during his courtship to Carolyn Bessette, whose friendship Terenzio also cherished. Kennedy’s tragic accidental death in 1999 would end the author’s association with the family, but the memory of her dedicated service is heretofore memorialized, with obvious admiration.
A fitting personal tribute to a unique boss.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8767-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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