Dramatic and revealing. Readers unfamiliar with the Joe Kennedy back story will be startled to learn of his puppet...
The making of war hero John F. Kennedy.
On Aug. 2, 1943, during the fighting in the South Pacific, a Japanese destroyer rammed PT-109, splitting the radarless torpedo boat in half, killing two sailors, and leaving 11 survivors in a fiery inferno, including its young skipper, JFK. The ensuing seven-day survival ordeal “forever transformed” Kennedy and paved the way for his elections to Congress (1947) and the presidency (1961). In this fast-paced narrative, veteran nonfiction writer Doyle (co-author: Navy SEALs: Their Untold Story, 2014, etc.) tells the familiar story of the charismatic JFK’s inspiring wartime leadership, offering no revelations but plenty of context. Just the year before, Joe Kennedy, master manipulator, patriarch of the superwealthy family, and former U.S. ambassador to England, had summoned an earlier PT boat hero, John Bulkeley, who had famously helped Gen. Douglas MacArthur escape from the Philippines, to a private meeting in Manhattan’s Plaza hotel, where he prevailed upon Bulkeley to help get young JFK into the PT boat service—for the publicity and to get the veteran’s vote after the war. As fate would have it, JFK’s survival in the Solomon Islands “transfigured [him] almost overnight into a war hero.” He then became a national “pop culture icon” when writer John Hersey’s lengthy account of the episode appeared in the New Yorker and, in condensed form, in Reader’s Digest—all with help from Joe Kennedy. The PT-109 story became a mainstay of JFK’s political campaigns, during which he saluted the heroics of his surviving crew members. A PT-109 float carried his shipmates in his presidential inaugural parade. “Without PT 109,” said a longtime aid, “there never would have been a President John F. Kennedy.”
Dramatic and revealing. Readers unfamiliar with the Joe Kennedy back story will be startled to learn of his puppet master–like role in orchestrating JFK’s rise to the presidency.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-234658-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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