By ferreting out new sources and new material and putting the familiar tales into a broader social context, Leamer gives a...
Another Kennedy family saga, this one focusing on the women, from Irish forebears to feminist Rory Kennedy, daughter of Robert and Ethel.
For Kennedy aficionados, much of the material is familiar. In 1849, immigrants Bridget Murphy and Patrick Kennedy met on the boat from Ireland. Nine years after their marriage, she was a widow with four children who worked as a domestic servant, then bought and ran a variety store. In some ways, for the women of the Kennedy family, Bridget's story is as inspiring as it gets. From Rose, who married Bridget's grandson, Joe, to some two dozen grandchildren, author Leamer (King of the Night, 1989) tells a story that is as sad as it is tragic, with Rose as its center. In the grip of the Roman Catholic Church—which saw the role of a woman as mother and moral center—Rose changed from an ambitious, lively, curious girl to a wife and mother whose emotions were rigidly controlled and whose mechanisms of denial so highly refined that she could accept her husband's lovers—notably Gloria Swanson—into her home. She passed much of that legacy on to her daughters Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Jean. Open displays of tenderness were reserved for Rosemary, the retarded child, who was lobotomized and institutionalized out of the public eye. Kathleen is captured as the American who enchanted English society until her death in a plane crash; Eunice as the most successful in building a life of her own. Pat and Jean were not so lucky. The prickly paths of the daughters-in-law—Jackie, Joan, and Ethel—are included here as well. Although the ambitions of many of Rose's granddaughters, including Maria Shriver and Caroline Kennedy, have been tempered by marriage and children, theirs is a generation that seems to have shaken off the chains of Kennedy women as victims of a moral dichotomy.
By ferreting out new sources and new material and putting the familiar tales into a broader social context, Leamer gives a clearer if not always brighter picture of what it means to be a Kennedy woman.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42860-7
Page Count: 895
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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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