JFK completists may find this useful, but Caroline Kennedy’s recent collection of interviews with her mother should be...
A sometimes-revealing but never earth-shattering portrait of John and Jacqueline Kennedy’s life in the White House—only within whose walls and only at the very end would they “finally bridge the yawning emotional chasm between them.”
Much-practiced celebrity biographer Andersen (Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger, 2012, etc.) digs beneath the surface—and certainly deeper than in many of his other books—to examine the essential loneliness of both Jack and Jackie, both the products of privilege, both essentially abandoned, and both tough and independent. (Both were voracious readers, too, and of better things than celebrity biographies.) Jack channeled his emotional neediness through womanizing (and, courtesy of Andersen’s careful approach, we learn his pet name for his penis), including an undeniably sordid episode with a drunk teenager on Jackie’s own bed. Jackie channeled hers, in part, by riding horses, which occasioned barbs among the pair, he saying it was a sport that “appeals to some awfully dull people,” she saying, “I think Liberace looks in the mirror less often than Jack does.” But after the loss at birth of their son, Patrick, the two drew together, with JFK concerned that Jackie would slip into depression. Then came Dallas, and with it, Jackie’s steady role in holding the nation together in a profound moment of grief—grief that, as befit her character, she nursed in private. Andersen is evenhanded, but even so, he slips into the overstated clichés of the genre, as when after Jackie’s death: “Americans…contemplated what their world would be like without this living, breathing reminder of a man and an era of political idealism that…seemed at one time to hold so much promise.”
JFK completists may find this useful, but Caroline Kennedy’s recent collection of interviews with her mother should be readers’ first pick.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3232-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
© 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.
