An intimate and compelling look at “the most brilliant star in the Kennedy firmament.”
Best-selling biographer Andersen (These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie, 2013, etc.) chronicles John F. Kennedy Jr.’s too-brief life and the complex relationship he shared with his beautiful, enigmatic mother, Jacqueline.
As the only son of John and Jackie Kennedy, the most “glamorous couple” of their generation, JFK Jr. came into the world burdened by expectations. JFK hoped his son would one day enter politics; at the same time, though, he also expressed a desire that John Jr. “would do whatever [made] him happy.” Ultimately, though, it would be his widow, Jackie, who influenced their son the most. She, too, wanted him to forge his own path. But she also had a keen sense of herself as the keeper of her husband’s legacy and that John Jr. would one day become the Kennedy family standard-bearer. A devoted mother, Jackie fought to protect both her children from the media attention that followed them into their lives as private citizens. She also did everything she could to keep JFK’s memory alive in her son. In the meantime, Jr. developed a passion for the stage. But under pressure from Jackie, he abandoned his dream to study acting. Still, he never left the spotlight and went on to have high-profile affairs—of which his mother wholeheartedly disapproved—with celebrities like Madonna and Daryl Hannah. He struggled to find his political identity and fulfill his mother’s wishes for him through ventures like the short-lived pop-political magazine George. In the end, though, he never quite found his career footing. Three years before his tragic death at age 38, John Jr. married Carolyn Bessette, who mirrored Jackie in her patrician bearing, stylishness and need for control. Sensitive and astute, Andersen’s book offers an intriguing look at a fraught mother-son dynamic that, years after the deaths of both Jackie and John Jr., still has the power to mesmerize.
An intimate and compelling look at “the most brilliant star in the Kennedy firmament.”Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476775562
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
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
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