Leaming doesn't present much new for Kennedy buffs, but the age of Downton Abbey offers fresh context for this story of...
A biography of the comparatively unheralded sister closest in age to John F. Kennedy strains to find something new to say about the Kennedy clan.
How this book was written might be more interesting than the actual contents, as Leaming apparently stumbled across her story while researching more substantial biographies (Churchill Defiant, 2010, etc.). The framing sustains some suspense, as the book begins with an unnamed source whose identity isn’t revealed until the final pages. In between, Leaming chronicles a changing Britain through World War II and its immediate aftermath, as the country’s mood changed from isolationism and appeasement—in line with the position favored by Ambassador Joseph Kennedy—to a patriotic engagement with the Nazis, which found many sons of the British aristocracy serving and dying in the war, to an aftermath that saw both Churchill and the aristocracy challenged by a populist surge. Amid all this is a love story that wouldn’t fill a book if it didn’t involve the Kennedys. Leaming mainly examines the romance between a feisty debutante and Billy Cavendish, heir to a prestigious dukedom. Marrying Billy would give Kick an identity, wealth, and power independent of her family, but it would also mean crossing her family by marrying outside the Catholic Church. True love weathered those challenges, but the war ended Billy’s life a month after they wed, with Kick in America (to the displeasure of her new British family) mourning the recent death of her brother in the war. Should Kick remarry, as Billy prophetically advised? Will she retain her British ties or return to live in the States? While the young widow tried to figure out her life without becoming a duchess (a future she seemed to miss as much or more than her late husband), she made a surprising choice that would further alienate her family and result in her early death.
Leaming doesn't present much new for Kennedy buffs, but the age of Downton Abbey offers fresh context for this story of American royalty and its more tradition-minded British counterpart.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07131-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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