Into the Kennedy aura once more, but brightly.
A gallimaufry of musings on the Kennedy family showcases some classy political writing.
Willis (Mob, p. 1475, etc.) pulls together 21 articles and book excerpts to form a collection centered on Jack, Bobby, and Ted. The aim is to provide revealing glimpses into a family that has struck a deep chord in American life, and although the insights don't necessarily hold any water, much of the writing here is superb. “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Norman Mailer’s acid deflation of the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, reminds us that when it came to political reporting, he could out-Wolfe and out-Thompson them all. An excerpt from Richard Reeves's President Kennedy chillingly recalls the bad advice JFK took from Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow concerning Vietnam, and the good advice he ignored from the likes of George Ball. In a portion of The Dark Side of Camelot, Seymour Hersh contributes an uncharacteristically sensitive look at the role JFK’s father played in shaping his personality. There are a couple of gripping airplane disaster stories (Kathleen's death, Ted's near-miss) and a brooding piece from Jack Newfield’s Robert Kennedy: A Memoir about the changes Bobby underwent as his political education transformed him from intolerant authoritarian to a man who identified with all of life's losers. There are also a couple of unexpected pieces: a portrait of the pitiful Marina Oswald from Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale and “The Exner File,” historian Michael O'Brien’s examination of Jack's mob connections as mediated through girlfriend Judith Exner. “The Holy Family,” Gore Vidal's 1967 essay on the fraudulence of the Kennedy mystique, shows Jack outmaneuvered by Khrushchev and made to look ludicrous by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, trumped on all his social legislation by a truculent congress. But if there was one thing the Kennedys excelled at, it was projecting an image; they continue to cast it long after death.
Into the Kennedy aura once more, but brightly.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56025-333-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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