An intimate and compelling look at “the most brilliant star in the Kennedy firmament.”
Best-selling biographer Andersen (These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie, 2013, etc.) chronicles John F. Kennedy Jr.’s too-brief life and the complex relationship he shared with his beautiful, enigmatic mother, Jacqueline.
As the only son of John and Jackie Kennedy, the most “glamorous couple” of their generation, JFK Jr. came into the world burdened by expectations. JFK hoped his son would one day enter politics; at the same time, though, he also expressed a desire that John Jr. “would do whatever [made] him happy.” Ultimately, though, it would be his widow, Jackie, who influenced their son the most. She, too, wanted him to forge his own path. But she also had a keen sense of herself as the keeper of her husband’s legacy and that John Jr. would one day become the Kennedy family standard-bearer. A devoted mother, Jackie fought to protect both her children from the media attention that followed them into their lives as private citizens. She also did everything she could to keep JFK’s memory alive in her son. In the meantime, Jr. developed a passion for the stage. But under pressure from Jackie, he abandoned his dream to study acting. Still, he never left the spotlight and went on to have high-profile affairs—of which his mother wholeheartedly disapproved—with celebrities like Madonna and Daryl Hannah. He struggled to find his political identity and fulfill his mother’s wishes for him through ventures like the short-lived pop-political magazine George. In the end, though, he never quite found his career footing. Three years before his tragic death at age 38, John Jr. married Carolyn Bessette, who mirrored Jackie in her patrician bearing, stylishness and need for control. Sensitive and astute, Andersen’s book offers an intriguing look at a fraught mother-son dynamic that, years after the deaths of both Jackie and John Jr., still has the power to mesmerize.
An intimate and compelling look at “the most brilliant star in the Kennedy firmament.”Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476775562
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
