The aura of Camelot lives on in a book for Kennedy completists and those who enjoy tales of the rich and powerful.
The prolific celebrity biographer returns to Camelot, this time to examine some of the women involved in the glamorous proceedings.
Taraborrelli (Becoming Beyoncé: The Untold Story, 2015, etc.) tells the story of Janet Lee Bouvier, mother to Jackie and Lee, a woman whose life’s work was the acquisition of money and power. Indeed, Janet never let either of her daughters marry without understanding the suitor’s finances and connections. After divorcing John Bouvier, Janet married Hugh Auchincloss, a Standard Oil heir with two magnificent estates, one in McLean, Virginia, and the other in Newport, Rhode Island. Once married to Auchincloss, Janet wanted more children, and she was able to bear two more. This is much more the story of Lee and Jackie and their lifelong competition with and devotion to each other. Janet fostered and fed their competition, praising Jackie and criticizing Lee. Even in their games, Jackie was the princess and Lee the handmaiden; everything seemed to come to Jackie easily, while Lee struggled. Throughout their lives, Janet told the girls what to do and how. She even caused the end of Lee’s first marriage. Her greatest failure was Aristotle Onassis. Lee was ready to leave her husband, Prince Radziwill, for Onassis but was convinced it would be fatal for John F. Kennedy’s re-election, and she backed off. Even after Kennedy was killed, Lee hoped, but then Jackie moved in. Lee stepped aside gracefully, but Janet was furious. Throughout their lives, especially Lee’s, Janet vetted every attachment, with demands for settlements and monthly allowances (in the tens of thousands) before marriage. Jackie learned from the master, securing $3 million from Onassis along with at least $30,000 a month. Ultimately, this is a narrative about money and the seemingly unlimited power that goes with it. It’s a sad story, but anyone desperately questing for wealth could learn from it.
The aura of Camelot lives on in a book for Kennedy completists and those who enjoy tales of the rich and powerful.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12801-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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