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 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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