Swollen with a daughter’s pride but also full of gripping detail.
The daughter of Kenneth O’Donnell, a principal adviser to John F. Kennedy, discusses the strategies, successes and failures that led to JFK’s becoming the 35th president.
O’Donnell, who had access to some key recordings and interviews her father had conducted, has written previously about him and the Kennedys, A Common Good: The Friendship of Robert F. Kennedy and Kenneth P. O’Donnell (1998). It was through Robert Kennedy (whom he had known at Harvard) that O’Donnell entered the Kennedy inner sanctum and became a dominant member of what the author calls “the Irish Brotherhood” (she disdains the darker “Irish Mafia” locution). O’Donnell begins the tale in Chicago in 1956, when JFK failed to win the vice-presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Then she rewinds a bit, taking us back to the late 1940s. We witness JFK’s run for the Senate, watch the warriors working during the 1952 election, return for a closer look at 1956 and then arrive at the major focus of the story—the 1960 election, which consumes nine chapters. The author ends with the inauguration and the Bay of Pigs, responsibility for which she endeavors to lay at the feet of the Eisenhower administration. O’Donnell’s subtitle is a bit misleading: Yes, she deals a bit with the other Irish advisers (Larry O’Brien and Dave Powers, principally), but the vast majority of the attention is on her father. Few of her characters have smudges. Yes, JFK had a wandering eye (mentioned once, never discussed), and RFK had a temper. But mostly it’s virtue that interests the author—JFK’s debating skills and intelligence, O’Donnell’s bluntness and fierce loyalty (we’re also told—more than once—that he was “quick as a cat”), and RFK’s organizational skills. Lines from Camelot end the text.
Swollen with a daughter’s pride but also full of gripping detail.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61902-462-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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