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ROSE KENNEDY

Name: ROSE KENNEDY
Author: Barbara A. Perry
ISBN: 978-0-393-06895-5

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A POLITICAL MATRIARCH

by Barbara A. Perry ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 2013

A mostly useful portrait of an overlooked figure in American political history.

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Serviceable life of the matriarch of a storied—and notably tragic—political clan.

As Perry (Presidential Oral History, Miller Center/Univ. of Virginia; Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier, 2004, etc.) observes, Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890–1995) first visited the White House in 1897, under the presidency of William McKinley. She last visited it when Ronald Reagan was in office, more than 80 years later. In between, of course, she gave birth to fabled sons and less fabled daughters. She was almost more Catholic than the pope, insisting that His Holiness take time to attend Mass during Easter even as the fate of the West lay in the balance. Kennedy was stern enough, too, to give Barbara Bush a run for the money, though she was also forgiving. As Perry writes, “When her husband and children fell short of her Victorian standards, she simply strove harder to correct, or at least mask, their flaws while touting their genuine accomplishments.” Tragedy marked her long life, with the deaths of three sons—Joe in combat, Bobby and John to assassins—and a daughter, Kathleen, in a plane crash. Perry capably charts Rose’s life, always overshadowed by her husband and offspring, though a more comparative view would have been welcome (how does Rose stack up next to Barbara Bush?). The narrative occasionally takes on the cast of a singsong recitation of biographical convention (“Exploring Concord’s environs, most happily with her gregarious father, Rose embraced history lessons permeating the cradle of American independence”), and some details are curious if perhaps of surpassing interest to scholars—the fact that “[o]nly occasionally did she breast feed her first several children,” for instance.

A mostly useful portrait of an overlooked figure in American political history.

Pub Date: July 15, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-393-06895-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)