A clearly written biography crammed full of memorable anecdotes about each of the Kennedys through four generations, about...
A convincing argument that Eunice Kennedy Shriver (1921-2009), the fifth of nine Kennedy children, changed the world in ways at least as significant as her more-famous relatives.
Pulitzer Prize–winning former Boston Globe journalist McNamara (Director, Journalism/Brandeis Univ.; Breakdown: Sex, Suicide, and the Harvard Psychiatrist, 1994, etc.) makes a compelling case that Eunice Kennedy’s primary crusade, on behalf of millions of citizens with cognitive disabilities, succeeded greatly as a civil rights movement, altering lives for the better not only for the disabled, but also for their families. Eunice received inspiration for the crusade from her parents’ treatment of daughter Rosemary, a cognitively disabled girl—and later, woman—hidden away in asylums, forced to undergo a lobotomy, and lied about to the public to protect the burnished Kennedy family image. The powerful and ruthless Kennedy patriarch, Joseph P., made the major decisions regarding Rosemary, and Joseph’s wife, Rose, gave in to her husband. McNamara demonstrates, however, that Eunice, John F., Robert, and all the other Kennedy siblings were complicit in the heartless treatment and public charade. Riddled by guilt and driven to accomplish her reform goals, Eunice influenced JFK to push Congress for legislation to improve the treatment of the cognitively disabled and fund research into causes and cures. That legislation won approval in 1963, shortly before the president’s assassination. In 1962, Eunice created Camp Shriver, which eventually became the Special Olympics in 1968. In each chapter, the author amply spotlights the formidable nature of Eunice, who refused to accept no for an answer when she spearheaded a crusade. In fact, McNamara learned, the word most often used to describe Eunice was “formidable.”
A clearly written biography crammed full of memorable anecdotes about each of the Kennedys through four generations, about Eunice’s influential husband, Sargent Shriver, and about dozens more characters from domestic politics, international diplomacy, and high society.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4226-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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