An intimate and revealing look at one of the 20th century’s most remarkable—and misunderstood—women.
A best-selling biographer chronicles the fabled life of Jackie Kennedy (1929-1994) and advances the claim that the former first lady spent the bulk of her post-Camelot life battling PTSD.
Jacqueline Bouvier seemed to have it all: an upper-crust upbringing and personal and social connections to the most elite families in America. Yet when the time came for her to wed, she was determined to escape “the bland predictability” of a high-society marriage that would require little else of her but to cater to the needs of a well-heeled husband. She met her match in “bad boy” John Kennedy, who she believed was her ticket to all the excitement she could ever want. JFK’s larger-than-life ambition brought the young couple international fame, but it also forced an essentially private woman to endure the brutal glare of the media spotlight and gradually transformed a dream into a nightmare long before JFK’s murder. Beset by personal difficulties, including two infant deaths and a foundering marriage, the assassination—to which she bore bloody witness—was the final straw. Leaming (Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945-1955, 2010, etc.) reveals that Jackie suffered from all the hallmarks of PTSD: sleep disturbances, obsessive ruminations about her husband’s murder and even thoughts of suicide. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and her beloved brother-in-law, Robert, in 1968 became triggers for even more psychological instability and led her to wed Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who she falsely believed would provide her the safety and distance she craved. Hounded by paparazzi and reviled by an American public eager to forget the historical traumas of the 1960s, Jackie nevertheless managed to build a life for herself on her own terms—rather than those dictated to her by her class—and emerge from tragedy, permanently wounded but “comparatively sane.”
An intimate and revealing look at one of the 20th century’s most remarkable—and misunderstood—women.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1250017642
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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