ROSE: A Biography of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy

A feature-written account of Rose Kennedy with every qualifier in full bloom; energetic, graceful, dazzling, accomplished and what have you not. Nothing much emerges here which you may riot have known but there are incidentals you might have forgotten; Miss Cameron relies on her old friend, Marie Greene, and a member of the retinue, Mary Jo Clasby, for informal comments; she also relies on her own (faulty?) memory when she repeats the same remark twice (Truman Capote's comment that Rose always looks as if she has just had nine Vitamin B-12 shots; her indomitable presence throughout the successive tragedies saying ""It's wrong for parents to bury their children""). Rose, like her father, always wanted to be first; Joe Kennedy joined her in this and he only wanted the best -- i.e. Rose. She proved to be an exemplary wife and dedicated mother (too driving?) who imposed a vigorous, competitive regimen on her children, and was more than usually devout. Essentially she remains inscrutable and only occasionally her biographer raises a mortal failing (was she stingy?) in a woman who seems to be immortal. At eighty she is still resplendently erect in her purple and white Givenchy. . . . Few will wonder, quite a few will admire, and many will buy the book and the image.